Warning: Reality has been cancelled. We are now all living in a movie. It's true. Consider this. Workers digging a hole last week found 1,000 buried skeletons. Old documents revealed they'd disturbed the graveyard of an ancient lunatic asylum or a centre of government, which is the same thing. Workers downed tools, feeling ghostly presences.
Anyone who has ever been near a movie knows what happens next: A ghostly army of crazed skeletons (a phrase that makes me think of those "Next Top Model" shows) will erupt into our world. Let me emphasize that the report is an ACTUAL recent news item about a property development in the US state of Mississippi.
Reader Catherine Lavergne, who forwarded it to me, said the site had been earmarked for a huge dental center. "A thousand walking dead below ground and a thousand living dentists above ground: will there ever be an unhappier spot on earth," she asked. Fair point, though one day I'll tell her about my high school.
On the same day, a reader sent me a report about a Briton aged 37 found dead next to an open box emblazoned with the words "Pandora's Box". Doctors found no alcohol or drugs in Jason Airey's system to explain why he died at his home in Carlisle. Intelligent readers will know the ancient legend which says that all the evil in the universe is locked in a chest labelled Pandora's Box, never to be opened. Anyway, if you see the essence of evil flowing along your street, don't touch it. Go home and close the windows. Like attracts like; so it should hopefully gravitate towards the offices of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, the generals of Myanmar, Rupert Murdoch and the like.
The final proof that we are living in a movie came from a reader in China, who forwarded a report that a woman ate so much to celebrate Lunar New Year that she exploded, like the character in the 1983 film "The Meaning of Life". A nutritionist at Beijing Friendship Hospital said the 58-year-old patient had "combustible gases" from alcohol in her stomach. An electric knife used by a surgeon apparently provided the spark which caused the explosion.
I don't wish to be morbid or anything, but you have to admit, if you have to die, this is a pretty cool way to go. You eat all your favourite foods, and before even your weighing scale can reproach you, BOOM. You're done. Of course, this only works if you are a shallow hedonist, but there are a lot of us around. Don't knock it till you've tried it.
Anyway, when I forwarded this draft column to that reader in China, he said that if normal reality had somehow evolved into movie reality, then everyone would be beautiful and every 90 minutes, a car chase would knock over a fruit stall. I told him to move to Thailand.
(Nury Vittachi is an Asia-based frequent traveller. Send ideas and comments via www.mrjam.org)
