MiSTing: Who You Were in Atlantis I 1/2
Chris Mayfield
contains more jokes plus a new (a possibly very heavy handed) host
segment. Enjoy!
Note: Claye Hodge did a MiSTing of the followup of this post,
reasonably entitled, "Who You Were in Atlanatis II." It's
available at the Web Site #9 MiSTings archive.
******************************************************************
Just another MiSTing by me. Comments are welcome. Chris Mayfield,
camf...@iastate.edu
[General opening antics]
[1...2...3...4...5...6...]
[SOL. Crow and Tom are at the desk arguing]
Crow: Andrew Lloyd Webber has single-handedly helped sustain
modern musical theatre.
Tom: ALW is a hack. His shows are all cookie cutter spectacles
without a trace of talent. Stephen Sondheim, on the other hand,
is a true composer with a solid grasp of music theory.
Crow: Come on. Sondheim's music sounds like screaming cats. He
doesn't have an ounce of ALW's lyrical talent.
[Mike's head pops up in front of Cambot]
Mike: Hi there. This is me, Mike Nelson, trapped up in space. I
decided to program the Bots into talking about one of my favorite
subjects: musical theatre! [walks up to desk] Hey, guys, I just
got this new Cole Porter CD...
Tom: That's nice. Now Sondheim does both lyrics and music. What do
you have to say to that, Webberhead?
Crow: That's *Lloyd* Webber, and he does his own orchestrations.
Or isn't Sondheim capable of doing that himself?
Mike: You see, it's got stuff from Anything Goes and Kiss Me,
Kate...
Tom: ALW is a trollish tycoon who is more interested in money than
music.
Crow: Brave words coming from someone who hasn't had a financial
success since 1962!
Mike: And there's even some stuff from Out of this World...
Tom: Hey! Company made money!
Crow: Ohhhh, sorry. 1970 then.
Tom: [hotly] Well, I've just got one thing to say.
Crow: What?
Tom: JEEVES!!
Crow: You--you bastard!
[Tom and Crow lunge at each other, sandwiching Mike. They all fall
down.]
[commercials]
[Back on the SOL. Mike has just finished deprogramming the Bots.]
Tom: Good one, Nelson. Have any more brilliant ideas?
Mike: Sorry. I didn't think it would be such an explosive subject.
I just wanted to talk about Fifty Million Frenchmen. Oh--Frank
Loesser is calling. [hits light]
[Deep 13. Dr. Forrester is sitting at a table in his pajamas.
There's a bowl and box of cereal in front of him. He is holding a
spoon about halfway to his mouth.]
Dr. F: [Nothing, just sits there with the spoon suspended near his
mouth.]
[SOL]
Mike: Uh, sir?
[Deep 13. Dr. Forrester jumps.]
Dr. F: Aaah! Oh, Nelson. Just eating a nutritious breakfast of
Sugar Crusted Choco-Bombs with marshmallows. I suppose you want
this week's experiment. [Picks up a disk and stares at it. And
stares at it.]
[SOL]
Tom: Actually, no.
Mike: Uh oh. It looks like someone's got the early morning stares.
Come in, Dr. Forrester.
[Deep 13. Forrester jumps again.]
Dr. F: Huh? Oh, right. Um, it's something from alt.alien.visitors.
Enjoy.
[Hits the button. Stares at the button he's pressing. And stares.]
[SOL. Chaos.]
All: We've got usenet sign!!
[6...5...4...3...2...1...]
>Subject: 4-D :: Who You Were In Atlantis, I
>Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 02:18:08 GMT
>From: Mark Hammons <m-h...@vm1.spcs.umn.edu>
>Organization: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Crow: It's sad when these things happen in your neighborhood.
>Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors
>
>One of the great things about many people who reject
>reincarnation is
Mike: That they come back as dung beetles.
> their spurious argument that everyone who
>remembers a past life says
Tom: "Gas was cheaper then."
> they were "Cleopatra" or "Marie
>Antoinette" or "Napoleon."
Crow: Or Shirley McLaine.
> Rather than address the question of
>whether reincarnation per se is possible, these people take the
>time-honored tack of finding a
Tom: Really good point that disproves everything I'm asserting.
> defenseless scapegoat, usually the
>mentally disturbed, to distract and detract from the issue.
>Guilt by association, at a drive-thru psyop near you.
Mike: Yeah, I'll have the Double Angst burger, some Enmity fries,
and a Shame-rock shake.
Tom: [drive-thru] That will be $5.34. Pull ahead to window 2.
> The
>"truth," of course, is that we--meaning you, me, and every other
>human being who ever lived, were all these people.
Crow: In other words, we're all loonies.
> That a person
>suffering confusion and mental disorientation would
Tom: Write this post.
> obsess on a
>given historical personality only shows that they were exposed to
Mike: Kryptonite.
Tom: Gamma radiation.
Crow: Zima *and* Mentos.
Mike and Tom: [gasp in horror]
>the cultural preoccupation which keeps those images active in the
>mind. The notion of individual, separate inherent existence, in
>short the near and dear trademark of objectivism,
Crow: Free Will is a registered trademark of Objectivism, Inc.
> materialism,
>and scientism, is the most lasting influence of upon humanity of
>those Atlantean badboys/girls),
All: [singing] Bad boys, bad boys. Whatcha gonna do when they come
for you...
Tom: To put you a padded cell.
> whom Edgar Cayce called the
>Children of Belial.
>
>The simple reality is much easier to see, but has always been
>vastly less politically servicable to Those Who Would Rule.
Tom: Do they work for Objectivism, Inc?
Mike: No, I think they're with Dictators R Us.
>Thus, ever since we were able to think for ourselves, there have
>been those whose self-interest has meant administering doses
Tom: Small Doses.
Mike: Exit 57.
Crow: Musical Shorts.
Tom: The News Hole.
Mike: Limboland.
All: Think about it, won't you?
> of
>what is most convenient for them to have us think. Along with a
>lot of other bad habits that have--er, pardon me--
Crow: I'm reincarnating some of them beans I had for lunch.
Tom: It's chili con reincarne.
> reincarnated in
>one culture after another, we did not invent this control
>mechanism.
Tom: [singing] We didn't start the mechanism. It's been
controlling, controlling since the world's been rolling...
> In terms of social heirarchy, everything we know we
>learned from the Atlanteans. We were there watching them.
Mike: Glancing in their window, watching them slowly removing
their silk nightie, letting it--
Tom: Nelson! Get a hold on yourself!
>
>Earlier, I noted that "atl" is a linguistic survival from an
>ancient time. It is probably the oldest single linguism.
Crow: I thought that was prosti--oh, linguism.
> At the
>risk of digressing for a moment, the Atlanteans did not speak
>verbally until much later in the game for them.
Mike: It's third and thirteen with four minutes left--and what's
this? It appears the Atlanteans have developed some sort of
verbal language! I don't believe this! It's anyone's game now!
> They
>communicated in earliest times by direct percepts; what you got
>was what you were.
All: Huh?
Tom: I've had fever dreams which have been more lucid than that
last sentence.
> As they continued to "devolve" (from our
>perspective), they lost the ability to create by thought and what
>once was substance became
Mike: Network programming.
> a transmission of imagery. They were
>true and full telepaths, with every psi-ability we can imagine
Tom: Telepathically communicate with squirrels.
Crow: Pyrokinetically ignite toupees.
Mike: Transcendental taste.
>--and some we cannot conceive; we still don't have the amp rating
>for it.
Tom: Ours only go up to ten.
> Their devolution, however, was uneven. Some kept fairly
>pure
Mike: Being Atlantean means being "ethnically clean."
> and "talked amongst themselves", while others besotted with
>physical thrill, had sex with their serving animals:
All: Ewwwww!
> us ("the
>daughters of
Mike: The American Revolution.
> men"). "Atl," which was originally unspoken and
>without vowels, in this English linear symbol system might be
>rendered "TL."
Crow: Or "BS."
> Our remote ancestors, in part their progeny,
>picked this up, and aspirated it, adding the "ah" sound.
Mike: [Mr. Rogers] Can you say "atl?" I knew you could.
> In the
>final analysis, the best translation of "atl" is "god born,"
>although it started out as action, a verb; "being made by/of
>godness"
Tom: It's God-roasted.
> is a better if bulkier rendering (the linguistic
>relationship of "goodness" is obvious).
>
>The Atlanteans were responsible for giving us language,
Mike: Here. It's language. Happy birthday. Now go away.
> for
>example, as well as social attitudes. We were very much the
>wannabes of Atlantis, a lot like the imitative
Crow: Iotians.
> nineteenth century
>Americans who sucked up to the European nobility. This is no
>accident
Tom: This was no boating accident!
> of historical comparison, either. The Atlanteans had
>blue skin.
Crow: Aaaaaooooooogaaaaah! Aaaaaooooooogaaaaah!
Tom: The Non-Sequitor Meter is off the scale!
> The truer the descent of the blood line from the
>Origin Time, the bluer the skin.
Mike: Did ancient Smurfs create the human race? Read the book.
> The concept of nobility was
>absorbed hook, line, and sinker by the human onlookers, and the
>notion of "blue blood" nobility is a psychological convention
Crow: Welcome to MentalCon 95. The DSM IV signing will be the
Ambassadors Room. Today's keynote speakers are Charlie Manson and
the Creepy Guy.
Mike: [shudders] That's not funny!
>carried forward through many a twist and turn to survive
>surprisingly direct and intact.
Mike: By the pricking of my thumbs something dorky this way comes.
> The old belief that a royal could
>heal with a touch is also from this time. The Atlanteans could.
Tom: [singing] Who can make the sun shine? The Atl man can.
>
>When the earliest Atlanteans came into this physical earth, they
>did not have the clarity to perceive individual existence.
>That's a 3-D mindset,
Tom: I can see how being 4 dimensional creatures they would be
unable to see something in 3-D.
Mike: Can you imagine one of those stereograms in 4-D? It makes my
head hurt just to look at the 3-D ones.
> and they were not yet that limited or
>precise. Instead, the very earliest Atlanteans delved into the
>coursing, pulsing, surging movements of biological life itself.
Crow: [low] Ooooooh mama!
>This was something of a plateau for them. They had, in a way,
>"bounced off" the solidity of the earth,
All: Boingee! Boingee! Boingee!
> even though they could
>and did work with the energies within it. Those energies were
>movements which they "felt" or "perceived" as consciousness.
>They identified with these movements, not with objects like
>rocks.
Mike: Evidently, the Atlanteans are too evolved for pet rocks.
Tom: I bet they were too advanced for disco, too.
>
>Biological life, on the other hand, was a medium between their
>noncorporeal existence and the physical matrix. Life already
>existed on the earth.
Crow: Working hard on the Question of the Universe.
> The lines of genii and species were joined
>already in progress.
Mike: We join your originally scheduled planet, already in
progress.
> The most ancient of the Atlanteans reached
>"down," into these larger lives, and flexed them like we would
>muscles.
All: [Austrian] We are here to pump [clap] you up!
> They stretched and molded the parameters of the
>biological existence. The great migratory routing of
Crow: Coconuts.
Tom: [British] Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
> animals,
>for instance, is a remnant of this. The merging of the
>Atlantean consciousness and the animals of this world was
Tom: Illegal in most states.
>expressed by great sweeping movements in rhythm with the larger
>context of the solar and lunar cycles. In time, they created
>intimacies between species,
Crow: Next on Geraldo, interspecies dating. Our guests are Pogo
and Heptzebah. Later, we'll interview the survivor of the tragic
and bizarre love triangle of Chip, Dale, and Gadget.
> blending one with another in what was
>to them an artform.
Mike: Billy made the most adorable unicorn in class today. We put
it up on the fridge so everyone could see.
> Most natural symbiotic systems are descended
>from the most ancient times of Atlantean emergence. They did
>this by "warping" continuities together,
Tom: With OS/2.
> making one "dependent"
>on the other in a way that is inexplicable in 3-D but is clearly
>obvious from a 4-D perspective.
Crow: Impossible for anyone in 3-D to understand, except for the
author.
Tom: We'll skip the perfunctory "Why, of all people, does *he*
know the true meaning of life" remark.
>
>Eventually they increased their resolution and "discovered" the
>"ultimate" discrete unit of "existence,"
Mike: "Quotation" "marks."
> to them anyway, which
>turned out to be the biological individual. It was to them the
>"atom" of moving (read: living) consciousness.
Crow: Oh no! It's Ludwig Plutonium's Grand Unified Theory!
> Remember,
>movement = consciousness.
Tom: Veni ergo sum.
> Eventually--and I am cutting the story
>short here for brevity's sake--they picked a single species into
>which to project themselves as "individuals." Guess who?
Crow: Are you known for your work in the theatre?
> Our
>anthropoid ancestors, who were still quite content to pick
>berries and grub for roots in season.
Mike: Seeing how it would be pretty stupid to grub for roots out
of season.
>
>A whole lot of things came very quickly. The informing Atl
>consciousness
Tom: The Atlantis Enquirer; informing Atl consciouses want to
know.
> adapted the anthropoid form, giving it height,
Mike: Depth and width.
>larger brain capacity, and so forth. They loved colors,
>especially dark colors (remember they come from a world of bright
>lights),
Crow: Scratch the thing about disco.
> and gave the creature that was to be their dwelling place
>a dark blue skin. This took no time, for these beings simply
>made it so
Mike: Engage.
> on the 4-D level and the 3-D fell right into place--as
>it still does.
>
>One of the first things the Atls discovered was that life is
>work.
Mike: You have to be a flippin' pan-dimensional being to figure
that one out?
> Like Job in Lawnmower Man, only in reverse, when they
>projected their consciousness into anthropoids as individuals,
>they ran into little problems like the need to eat, and a strange
>but thrilling urge to make babies.
Crow: Out of plywood.
> The first generations just
>willed things to be the way they wanted, but as they wandered
>down through the stream of life
Mike: Great. Now it's a Hesse novel.
> the Atls lost touch with these
>abilities.
Tom: And their mothers.
Crow: [elderly falsetto] You're a superevolved consciousness with
the power to shape space and time; can't you find a couple
minutes to call home?
> The concept of a machine was wholly outside their
>frame of reference.
Tom: The wheel? It'll never work.
> So when they came to the conclusion it was
>easier to have things done by another living being rather than do
>all the effort themselves,
Mike: They opened a factory in Taiwan.
> they figured a stitch in time (pun
>intended) saved them trouble. They created US.
Tom: The magazine or the country?
>
>Reaching back into the basic anthropoid stock,
Crow: [Bullwinkle] Nothin' up muh sleeve...
> they made slight
>changes and voila! What you think of as your "human"
>consciousness came into being. Except, you were in heaven.
Tom: Oh, and you had four arms. And--and the sky was purple, too.
Yeah. That's it.
>Being around an Atl was to be in utter, complete oceanic bliss.
Mike: Oceanic. Get it? Atlanteans? Huh, huh!? GET IT?!?!
>They had that effect. And even if you were schlepping the
>equivalent of latrine duty, you were just SO grateful not to be
>picking berries anymore for a living.
Tom: Migratory workers meet aliens in John Steinbeck's "The
Zamblots of Wrath."
> The Atl provided
>everything you needed to get your work done.
Crow: Yeah, but they took the cost of your uniform out of your
first paycheck.
> Literally.
>Inlcuding the need to work.
>
>Well, as time diminished their powers, the Atl became more and
>more dependent on
Mike: Sweet booze.
> their serving animals. They did not regard
>this as a problem. Unfortunately, when you rub shoulders with
>gods on a daily basis, they are rubbing shoulders with you.
Crow: Met that Jesus fellow. Real nice guy.
> They
>had made us bright enough to do the highly complex tasks that the
>Atl would implant fully into our minds. As their mental
>abilities decayed, they became
Tom: Politicians.
Crow: Comedy Central programming execs.
Mike: Them Mentos kids.
> less successful at doing this and,
>pardon us humbly, we noticed the buzz wasn't as good as it used
>to be.
Crow: Mike, what's the buzz?
Mike: I don't know. Tell me what's a-happenin'.
Tom: NO ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER REFS!!!
Mike: Jeez--I thought I cleared you guys up.
> Their very mind control of us served to stimulate our own
>evolution as thinking (mentating) creatures. Oops.
Crow: I wet 'em.
>
>Eventually, during the first destructions brought about by their
>energy technologies, some of us were transplanted to the new
>"colonies"
Mike: Live the good life on the Off-World Colonies.
> on the earth. Here we were sprucing the earth, but
>the Atl no longer had weather control and sometimes we went
>hungry.
Tom: Hell, sometimes we died.
> And so on, you get the idea. About 40,000 years ago,
>some of our ancestors went feral.
Crow: Others went Thornn.
> And that is the beginning of
>"our" history as an independent "thinking" species.
Tom: This guy is to quotations what McElwaine is to
capitalization.
> One of the
>things we had watched the Atlanteans do was work stone, so we did
>that too. We did to animals what they had been doing to us.
Crow: No, no, no. You've got it all wrong. It's do unto others
before they do unto you.
Tom: Actually...
>Yes, we were eaten by the Atl,
Mike: I call no "taste like chicken" jokes right now.
> at least by the Children of
>Belial.
Mike: Or the children of Mara.
Tom: Did you see where it's David *and* Leigh, now?
> You don't think these beings acquired the reputation as
>being devils for no reason, did you?
Crow: Is that a rhetorical question, or is the author actually
working on the premise that we believe what he's saying?
> I did not say that
>everything in heaven was heavenly by OUR standards.
Tom: What about OSHA standards?
>
>Now, the reason that the oldest human "artworks" are images comes
>from our sojourn in heaven. To us, all the Atl had to do was
>think a thing and it was so.
Crow: Didn't they have any failsafes?
Tom: Yeah, like what about when you look over a balcony and wonder
what it would be like to jump off, or you're driving and someone
cuts you off and you wish his head would explode, or you see a
pretty girl and you think about her wrapped up in cellophane with
you throwing tapioca pudding at her while Bea Arthur is there in
a leather diaper and thumb screws...and...[looks around and sees
Mike and Crow staring at him]...um...
Mike: [quickly jutting in] I think we've heard enough, Tom. More
than enough.
> Thus, when we went back to good old
>mother nature, we made images the way the Atl had put images into
>our heads. Get the picture?
All: No.
> Yes, we see. Monkey see, monkey do
>may be trite, but tells it like it is.
>
>We learned to make things from the Atl. We learned social
>structure from the Atl. We learned to treat the Earth without
>conscience from the Atl.
Tom: We learned parallel sentence structure from the Atl.
> And above all, we learned to think of
>ourselves as above nature, in charge of all things, from the Atl.
>But they created us, so what were we to do?
>
>Well, as you have no doubt already gathered,
Mike: I am completely mental.
> Atlantis was Eden,
>and it was from that experience all our legends of
Tom: The fall.
> a Golden Age
>in whatever culture descend. (Side note: I bought Bramley's
>book, Gods of Eden, one week, and the next day came that rather
>persuasive note which showed it to be a Scientologist-oriented
>document.
Crow: Obviously, aliens have been monitoring my shopping
excursions.
Tom: You're ignoring the fact that God might be trying to
communicate directly to him to warn him of the dangers of
government run bookstores.
> I threw the book in the trash immediately without
>reading further than the first chapter, and so I don't know to
>what extent or how he treated this point).
Mike: [getting up] I'm glad to let others form my opinions.
[Commercials]