And now for something completely different...

A child was born on the fifteenth of October. This, however, is of no consequence to the rest of this story; just an interesting thought to keep in mind. I myself was born on the twenty-fifth of October. This too has no apparent consequence to the following story, though it could explain why I was the way I was. On the twenty-eighth of October, a star died. As strange as it might sound, this is of great importance to the story at hand.

However, to completely understand this, we must move back.
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
err.. maybe a little further back?
Fire and plague to London come in the year of six and twenties three
No, no, not that either.. hmm lets try again..
...of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth
Oh dear, wrong country..
OOga! Knacrpt Ting! P!zack!
Err.. Where in the name of the devil was that?

Oh well, what the hell. See, the trick is that you don't exactly have to be *anywhere* to understand this. This, however, is deceptively simple for the fact of the matter is that you have to be *everywhere*. Now being everywhere isn't really that difficult, except that being everywhere isn't enough. You have to be at *every time*. This, needless to say, could prove quite a bugger, if you'll pardon my Klatchian.

Nevertheless, we shall forget about that for a while and make do with what we have right now. So, coming back to where we were, a star had just died. This particular star was quite big, and situated conveniently at the other end of the universe. He didn't look anything like Rock Hudson, though. He didn't look anything like Sylvester Stallone, either. Too many tentacles for a start. In fact, this particular star would have made Mick Jagger look like a very successful contender for the Intergalactic Good-Lookers competition thingie, held every ten Galactic years on the planet of Twozk. (In fact, in Twozkian, the contest itself was called Kling, but that seemed to lack a certain... well... zing to the name.)

Tentacles on any other planet would have been strange. For a start, they'd gone out of fashion a few Galactic decades ago. Anyway coming back to the point, the star - whose name was K!zparkla Ztinkspic, but who we shall call Bob for the sake of simplicity - was dead. And thus, he had to be buried.

Incidentally, this particular incident occurred, though in a different time-frame, roughly around the same time that Mussolini marched into and took over Italy. Do not, however, get too comfortable, because it was also the time that Maxentius was proclaimed the Roman Emperor, Tchaikovsky wrote some sort of Pathétique (no pun intended) Symphony No. 6 in B Minor... Just shows how time's not exactly straight but all squiggly.

Thus, Bob was given a typical - however, to show that some things never change around the universe, traditional in this case meant expensive - burial. Which basically meant that there would be a tiny rip in the space-time fabric and the body would be slipped into hyperspace. Problem is, this process sort of worked the same way a sewer did. You prayed and prayed and sent it off, but didn't really wonder where it was going. This, however, did not mean much for the star's planet. It didn't even mean much for the star. It did, however, mean a lot for a tiny blue-green planet situated at the suburbs of a rather crowded galaxy. It meant, and this is rather important, that that planet was about to die.

So as a result of this, the bipedal apes that called the planet their home looked up on the morning of the fifteenth of October and quite literally didn't know what hit them. An impartial observer a few light years away with an extremely high resolution telescope informed the rest of the galaxy that rip had materialised in the space-time continuum from which a small but highly accelerated body was shot out that was aimed directly at the centre of the planet. The result was a soft implosion as the body passed right through the planet, causing it to explode into millions of particles. The body was last seen hurtling into deep space.

The outcome of this event was that the boy who was born on that very day had a huge favour done for him, as he was saved a few decades of suffering. The galactic community mourned for a few weeks the death of the planet they had - with so much difficulty - kept themselves a secret from. However, the new asteroid belt formed where the planet used to be had greatly increased the desirability of the area which soon became a vacation spot and was advertised throughout the galaxy. And thus, at the end, everything seemed to work out for the best.

Weekends, beware: a rant of sorts...

Weekends, beware. Watch out behind you, you'll never know when they'll strike. They're out looking for weekends, see? Oh, you don't? Ah, sorry. I forget. Perhaps I should enlighten you on the reason for this warning? They (as in everybody who wants to make life miserable, including lawyers, bankers, income tax officials, people named Bob, Jimmy Page, Angus Young and most importantly, school authorities) are tracking down weekends mercilessly and cutting them down.

It's part of a large group of people, see? They've always hated weekends, ever since weekends were invented (incidentally - and totally unrelated - ever wondered *when* they were invented?). Probably due to some traumatic childhood experience that happened to them on a weekend at some part of their lives. Freud would have a field day on such as these.

It's the typical conspiracy theory: these people, led by a man named Bob (who, in another totally unrelated set of information has a dog named Timmy) plan to rid the workweek of such weekends. The plan has been a long standing one and numerous people along the centuries have tried to warn us of it. Notable people include Cassandra, Nostradamus - who is rumoured to have said to his wife "Buggre alle for a Larke. I amme sick of this workeweek. One ay dayye lik thif ennywone withe sense shoulde be enjoyinge themselfs instead ofe being cooped up withe thes soddinge plague victimse" - and my uncle Charlie (who, in yet another unrelated information note is happily serving time at the local psychiatric asylum.)

They function in subtle ways, and are more dangerous than ever now. They give you a few days of during the workweek and get you feeling all good and such, but this is just a pretext to destroy all weekends... Permanently. So the bottom line is this: Do all you can to protect weekends. If you find a weekend lost, lonely and afraid, take it home and hide it until the hullabaloo has died down (Don't worry, they don't eat too much and are real fun to have around. Very educational for the kids too, and if you don't have kids, well they'll probably arrange for a few to come your way soon enough).