[Python-Dev] Python 2.1.1

[Eric S. Raymond]

Barry A. Warsaw <barry@digicool.com>:
> You really don't want to know what that particular world looked like,
> but let's just say it involved lots and lots of angry elephants.

You've been *there*?  Dang...that's the timeline that scared me into
hanging up my lab coat.  It was a slow Saturday and I was hatching
Sinister Plan For World Domination number 4.

What happened to the other three?  Well...I had been planning to
terrorize the western U.S with a giant mechanical spider, until some
guys from Hollywood offered me way too much money for it.  The trained
army of radioactive gorillas I spent the movie money on didn't work
out -- my Igor flatly refused to shovel any more radioactive gorilla
poop, and you know how hard it is to get good help these days.
Blackmailing major cities with a Zeppelin-mounted death ray projector
sounded cool but Radio Shack was out of the parts.

OK, so plan #4 was to create voracious mega-amoebas using my Ionic
Mutatron and send them out to destroy all my enemies, especially that
kid who beat me up in third grade.  There I was, cackling insanely,
just about to unleash these slimy horrors on an unsuspecting world to
wreak havoc and destruction, when the eka-rhodium electrodes on the
Mutatron arced over.  This produced a wild spike of temporokinetic
energy, and guess where *I* was standing?  Silly me.

Before you could say "plot complication" I was materializing in the
Hyraxeum -- damn near nose-to-trunk with the High Pachyderm himself,
as it turned out, who was getting wound up to try out his newest
human-goad on a mahout they had just captured from the Fortified
Cities.  The mahout was terrified out of his wits, and you would have
been too if you'd seen what the High Pachyderm's tusks were covered
with and the lascivious way his trunk was curled around that cheese
grater.  Euggghhh...

It was crazy.  The High Pachyderm was trumpeting like mad, tuskers
charging at me from all directions, and me with at least 5.23 seconds
to go until the temporokinetic charge wore off.  Fortunately I
remembered that elephants communicate using modulated infrasonics that
they hear with the flat part of their foreheads, and I had my trusty
sonic screwdriver on me.  I set it to "infra" at maximum volume and
hurled it at the High Pachyderm -- hit the bugger right in the tiara.
He went berserk and his confused guards started crashing into each
other left and right, which was a pretty impressive sight since the
smallest of them weighed over two and a half tons.
 
It was touch and go there, let me tell you.  I caught one glimpse of
the mahout's rapidly-retreating heels just as the charge wore off and
I was slingshotted back to my lab.  My sonic screwdriver, of course,
followed within seconds -- horribly crushed and mangled.

And that's when I swore off building fiendish devices.  Electrocution
I can laugh at, having my monstrous creations turn on me is all in a
day's work, and that one time I was accidentally transformed into a
fly I found some truly remarkable uses for a three-foot-long
prehensile tongue.  But what the High Pachyderm had planned was too
twisted even for *me*.

I decided Sinister Plan #5 would have to be a bit less hardware-intensive,
if only as a rest for my frazzled nerves.  So I spent the last juice in
the batteries on the orbital mind-control lasers (long story) to implant
some subtle suggestions in a few minds at Netscape and IBM and elsewhere,
and started hitting the conference circuit pretty heavy.

What suggestions?  Oh, nothing important.  Nothing at all...BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes
the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and
gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim --
when he defends himself -- as a criminal.
	-- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law"