You can’t make a silk purse out of string theory
The ministry of silly hats is locked in a life-or-death struggle with the commission for tight-fitting suits. There’s no nice way to say this. It’s us or it’s them.
The commission for tight-fitting suits, you see, controls the purse strings of our rickety collective, although “controls” may not be quite the word.
The purse strings are not some simple system of latches and catches, whether actual strings are involved or not.
No: they are a subtle and diaphanous web of mysterious lines of force that may or may not interpenetrate any other constellation of gravities. This is called string theory.
Purse strings are not something you just have tucked away in a convenient corner of your breeches, or even right in the front of your breeches, like chaps used to in the European renaissance, which is probably when the idea of purse strings gained currency.
No pun intended, and none taken, I’m sure.
In those days, if one had a purse, it was a small sack roughly the size of a bull’s scrotum, with a string threaded through the neck of the thing. This string could then, obviously, be pulled to tighten the mouth of the sacklet to close it.
That probably takes longer to describe than to do, but one has to establish a baseline here, and this is to be noted as the Einsteinian theory of strings.
Anyway, metaphorically or not, it seems to us here at the ministry that the time has come to stand up and be counted. Or, failing that, to lie down and be counted.
Yes, we are dealing here with people whose alleged job is to count things. And it is the ministry of tight-fitting suits that, by means of string theory, directs those whose duty it is to count things.
The counters have already reached the longest prime number found since Pythagoras, but that hasn’t stopped them. No, they didn’t even pause for breath, just continued to count. It means something to be able to say you counted. Right?
Unfortunately, the old gladiatorial style of resolving interdepartmental disputes has faded away, and we’re all committed pacifists now.
We could have been gussying up, as we speak — lashing on a few old greaves, popping the dents out of the old breastplate, that kind of thing.
None of us has armour made overnight by the gods, as Achilles had in the Iliad, but still I’m sure we could find a bit of old chased steel to clang about in as we go into battle.
Mind you, the commission for tight-fitting suits has a direct line to the master of ordinances, and that means the weapons they’d be able to deploy against us in any kind of combat would be vastly superior to ours.
They’d surely have one of those Gulf War II bunker missiles that can wiggle its way around corners as it penetrates your concrete-lined underground hideout. And then we’d be gone — poof!