He's King Midas in reverse

Some of the monuments you may find around town if you have finished your schoolwork for the evening:

The Stolen Duck Monument. 8th Street and Lower Squankum Avenue. This fine statue with its prominent plinth represents the strong feelings the community had to fill their lives with more plinths than they otherwise would have. Note that the monument does not commemorate the stealing of a duck, or the stealing of ducks as a general concept, as these would be crimes and are therefore embarrassing or disrespectable. Instead by monumentalizing the past tense the stealing of the duck becomes someting in the past tense, possibly mythologized, and therefore is honorable.

Monument To the Presidential Birthplace. 8th Avenue and Lower Squankum Street. No presidents have been born around here yet, but it's surely only a matter of waiting long enough. That's assuming, of course, that the location of birth of a President is an aperiodic Markov chain dense in topography. It may take a while but eventually they've got to run out of other places. In case it turns out that birth location is not an apriodic Markov chain dense in topography there's a substitute plaque available which would change things to the Vice-Presidential Birthplace.

The Stolen Stolen Duck Monument. 18th Street and Lower Squankum Avenue. This memorial to the Stolen Duck Monument was erected when it was reported that the Stolen Duck Monument had been stolen, and it was an attempt to show that while these sorts of things may be happening that doesn't mean we can't have nice things anyway. (The nice things was specifically meant to exclude these things happening.) Although a ransom demand was paid to a whale located in Albany, New York, for return of the monument it was discovered after the building of the Stolen Stolen Duck Monument on the original site that they had mistaken the original site and thought it was 18th Street when it was, of course, 8th.

The Squirrel Monument. Upper Squankum and H Avenue. This ``fuzziest of the monuments'' came about in early 2006 as the result of a typographical error when the attempt to appreciate just how much we owe to SQL database software was confused with an attempt to appreciate the value of having squirrels sneak into buildings to disrupt unpleasant presentations involving colorful charts. In exchange for leaving the monument un-corrected the local squirrel population has promised to break up any meeting which exceeds ninety minutes or which would be improved by having shoes nibbled on.

The Stolen Duck Monument Monument. 8th Street and H Avenue. With all the trouble gone into the Stolen Duck Monument and a couple years gone by to let all senses of embarrassment and shame pass it seemed like a good time to commemorate the whole story. Thus here people can see the entire story of the Stolen Duck Monument, its stealing, its return, and also the longrunning debate about whether the Stolen Stolen Duck Monument is ``too plinthy'', ``not plinthy enough'', or just ``plinthy but not obnoxious about it''. Daily results of the debate are posted to leading plinth web sites.

The Sugar Packet Monument. H street and Middling Squankum. This fine piece of public statuary commemorates two of the greatest and commonest fantasies of everyday life. The first is the belief that if you hold two packets of sugar or sugar substitute close to each other and tears them open simultaneously then other people will estimate that you use far less sugar or sugar substitute than you actually do. The second is to suppose that those around you will form substantially worse impressions of you if they were to notice how much sugar or substitute you actually use, unless you really overdo it with, like, eighty packets going into those tiny cups of tea you get at the Chinese restaurant.

The Stolen Duck Duck Monument. Five Swamp Park. Here people were starting to get a little case of the giggles and figured why not take the chance to make things a tiny bit more plinthy yet? At 10 and 40 minutes after the hour make sure to duck in any of four approved senses of the word.

Trivia: In 1833 British railroad pioneer Richard Trevithick proposed building a cast-iron tower a thousand feet high in order to commemorate the previous year's Reform Act. Source: Remaking The World: Adventures In Engineering, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: The Great American Novel, Philip Roth. I'm liking it a lot, even when I recognize the actual incidents being used for fictional purposes.