Attention: Travel Advisory for those Readers Travelling with Ottoman Empire Passports!
The following is not a sign of the apocalypse. It is simply a travel advisory for my jet-setty readership.
Upon leaving the United States, my Official but Occasional Editor, Matthew Lie - Paehlke bungled things again and left my Canadian Passport on the zeppelin.
He claims he failed to realize that I had used it as a bookmark in the in-flight issue of Zepellins Illustrated while he was sleeping, but I know he is just lazy and didn't want to dig it out of the magazine trunk. As a result of his incompetence, I had only one passport for our return journey. I think in the future I will take Alphonso in the Zeppelin and said Mr. Lie - Paehlke ahead on my laufmaschine. He however claims not to be in sufficiently good shape to pedal a laufmaschine to Florida in 12 hours, but to that I say;
"My laufmaschine is always available for use on landing when Alphonso pedals it. Matthew are you less of a man than Alphonso? " then I add, "He's a Eunoch you know."
But my digressery grows excessive, there is a travel advisory to be had herein and so it shall be.
Would you believe that this ignorant young Canadian Customs agent with whom I was forced to barter for my passage like a peasant had the gall to deny the legitimacy of my passport from the Ottoman Empire! They did so despite the fact that it has all the usual security features such as Solid-Goldness, Jewel-Encrustedness and Signed-by-the-Emperor-himselfness. It's quite a fetching signature actually:
"For Von Mustard, may you always return from your travels twice as rich and half as young as the day you left, Mehmed VI Vahideddin."
And wouldn't you know it, those words have proved true to this day. Mehmed, was not a great emperor as far as Ottoman emperors go, but he was a good emperor and the most recent, which is yet another argument for the validity of my passport. I doubt there are any more up-to-date Ottoman Empire passports than mine floating about! With that in mind, here is what I said, glaring down my immensely large nose at the man behind the counter;
"Listen Commoner, how could it be obsolete if there is no newer version available?"
This was his nit-pickety response; "I'm sorry sir, but you know the Ottoman Empire no longer exists right?" That's what the young whippersnapper said to me!
What nonsense, everyone knows that the Ottoman Empire will rise again. The empire isn't non-existent, it's just laying low to lure us into a false sense of security. But he would have none of it. In the end, I had to go back up into the Zepellin, turn around and then land again using the Schattenmaschine to cloak our approach.
I will have to take this up with Kofi I believe, he can probably remedy the situation. I'll have him over for dinner, three glasses of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti and he's always up for recognizing a nation or two.
Upon leaving the United States, my Official but Occasional Editor, Matthew Lie - Paehlke bungled things again and left my Canadian Passport on the zeppelin.
He claims he failed to realize that I had used it as a bookmark in the in-flight issue of Zepellins Illustrated while he was sleeping, but I know he is just lazy and didn't want to dig it out of the magazine trunk. As a result of his incompetence, I had only one passport for our return journey. I think in the future I will take Alphonso in the Zeppelin and said Mr. Lie - Paehlke ahead on my laufmaschine. He however claims not to be in sufficiently good shape to pedal a laufmaschine to Florida in 12 hours, but to that I say;
"My laufmaschine is always available for use on landing when Alphonso pedals it. Matthew are you less of a man than Alphonso? " then I add, "He's a Eunoch you know."
But my digressery grows excessive, there is a travel advisory to be had herein and so it shall be.
Would you believe that this ignorant young Canadian Customs agent with whom I was forced to barter for my passage like a peasant had the gall to deny the legitimacy of my passport from the Ottoman Empire! They did so despite the fact that it has all the usual security features such as Solid-Goldness, Jewel-Encrustedness and Signed-by-the-Emperor-himselfness. It's quite a fetching signature actually:
"For Von Mustard, may you always return from your travels twice as rich and half as young as the day you left, Mehmed VI Vahideddin."
And wouldn't you know it, those words have proved true to this day. Mehmed, was not a great emperor as far as Ottoman emperors go, but he was a good emperor and the most recent, which is yet another argument for the validity of my passport. I doubt there are any more up-to-date Ottoman Empire passports than mine floating about! With that in mind, here is what I said, glaring down my immensely large nose at the man behind the counter;
"Listen Commoner, how could it be obsolete if there is no newer version available?"
This was his nit-pickety response; "I'm sorry sir, but you know the Ottoman Empire no longer exists right?" That's what the young whippersnapper said to me!
What nonsense, everyone knows that the Ottoman Empire will rise again. The empire isn't non-existent, it's just laying low to lure us into a false sense of security. But he would have none of it. In the end, I had to go back up into the Zepellin, turn around and then land again using the Schattenmaschine to cloak our approach.
I will have to take this up with Kofi I believe, he can probably remedy the situation. I'll have him over for dinner, three glasses of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti and he's always up for recognizing a nation or two.
posted by Matthew Lie - Paehlke at 1:42 p.m.
6 Comments:
Editors Note!
While, I do admit that in most ways I am less of a man than the intrepid, suave and brilliant Alphonso, I would like to clarify the difficulty of the proposed task somewhat for the sake of those readers not well-informed on the pre-cursors of the bicycle.
This is from About.com:
"The German Baron Karl Drais von Sauerbronn invented the "Laufmaschine" or "Running Machine", a type of pre-bicycle. The steerable Laufmaschine was made entirely of wood and had no pedals; a rider would push his/her feet against the ground to make the machine go forward. Sauerbronn's bicycle was first exhibited in Paris on April 6, 1818."
Even Von Mustard's suggestion that I would be able to pedal is inaccurate! How could I possibly cause such a vehicle to travel from Toronto to Florida in the time it took the Zepellin? At least it wasn't Von Mustard's Solid Gold celerifere.
"The celerifere was another similar early bicycle precursor invented in 1790 by Frenchmen, Comte Mede de Sivrac, however, it had no steering."
As an aside, a Schattenmaschine is not a bicycle precursor, it is a large engine containing certain rare crystals and noble gases which somehow generates immense, but somehow curiously unremarkable, shadows. As far as I know the only one in existence is contained in Von Mustard's Zepellin and I am not at all clear on the principles by which the machine works. It apparently has something to do with introducing "shadowy corpuscles" into the "formative matrix of the ether itself."
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