By: Alien Jones, Intergalactic Correspondent
Plus 5, carry the one = get some more roughage in your diet.
Greetings Earth losers!
Earth losers, this is a very special edition of Ask the Alien.
Sometimes societies do things that are wrong and don’t realize those actions are wrong until years later.
It’s happened on your planet. Europeans arrived in the New World, declared it to be theirs, ignoring the natives’ protests of, “Hey, guys, we’re right here. We can totally hear you.”
To put it in perspective, imagine how P.O.’d you’d be if you were relaxing in your living room, watching some human sporting event, enjoying a beer and a pizza and out of nowhere, a European explorer plunks a flag down on your barca lounger and announces your crap is his crap now.
But I digress.
Aliens have their own sordid past and a question from science fiction author A.H. Browne of “Pouring my Art Out” causes this outer space traveler to rehash a dark time in my species’ history:
Actually, my first question was going to be; “Uh, you aren’t going to probe us, are you?” You jumped the gun on that one.
Indeed, I’ve addressed this difficult topic before, but since only 3.5 people read Bookshelf Q. Battler’s nonsense, it’s worth repeating.
Yes, it’s true. In the past, and for many, many years, our Supreme Overlord, the Mighty Potentate, commissioned a series of abductions, which were carried out as follows:
- Kidnap humans
- Insert probing devices in hind quarters
- Retrieve data on what makes humans tick, how they function, and what they had for breakfast
- Return humans to Earth.
- Spritz them with gin so NOBODY believes them.
- In fact, to make sure nobody believes them, we usually took eccentric folk in the first place. You know that guy at the bar who’s always babbling about how the government is reading his mind and cats are actually spies that report all of your activities to the CIA? Yeah, we’d usually scoop him up in a heartbeat.
Was probing our finest hour?
No, but we learned a lot about you and after 10,000 years of experience, we offer, in the name of peace and putting this sad chapter behind us, the full summation of our probing knowledge:
Eat more fiber. Seriously. You’re all backed up worse than I95 after a semi-truck rollover in the eastbound express lane.
Further, a public service announcement:
The Mighty Potentate cancelled the probing project over a thousand years ago. There has not been an officially sanctioned probing expedition since medieval times. If you want to know why the dark ages were full of angry people who were constantly hacking each other to pieces, it’s because they were so angry that we were probing the bejesus out of them.
But that’s all done now. Once we reached the limit of all possible data available through lodging roving robotic devices into human nether regions, the MP put the kibosh on the whole deal. After all, no one wants to waste their time watching something they’ve already seen. It’s like MASH. Why are the reruns still on the air? We get it, Klinger. You’re wearing that dress in the hopes the brass will send you home.
However, we do have some young aliens who don’t know any better. Your human teenagers range from 13-19. Our aliens have their young and dumb period between 100-1,000. I always say, “Boy, I hope no one thinks ill of me just because of some stupid stuff I did when I was 999 and didn’t know any better.”
Anyway, our younguns often get rowdy and their idea of a fun Saturday night includes:
- Flying to Earth
- Probing humans
- Teleporting cows to different locations, thus confusing the cow and the human farmer who’s left wondering where his cow went.
- Crop circles (the Mighty Potentate had once ordered these markings to show our shock troops where to land, but the hostile takeover was cancelled once your planet invented reality TV, thus proving to the MP that your species wouldn’t be a welcome addition to his empire.)
In short, if an alien demands to probe you, he does this without the Mighty Potentate’s blessing, and thus you may feel free to defend yourself from insertion of a Probe-o-matic.
Usually, all you have to do is state to the alien intruder, “I’m telling the Mighty Potentate on you!” and they’ll skeedaddle.
Ornery aliens always wise up once the possibility of vaporization is on the table.
Now that you humans no longer have to fear probing, might I suggest that you use your new found free time to read one of Browne’s books? For example, a lazy, opinionated janitor at an intergalactic Texas saloon becomes an unlikely hero during a spaceship hijacking in Saloon at the Edge of Nowhere.
Browne seems to have a good sense of humor, so the 3.5 of you who enjoy BQB’s scribblings will probably like this book too.
(Did I really get through an article about probing and not make a Browne/brown pun? I’m slipping.)
Alien Jones is the Intergalactic Correspondent for the Bookshelf Battle Blog, on a mission to raise Earth’s collective intelligence levels one question at a time. Do you have a question for the Esteemed Brainy One? Tweet it to @bookshelfbattle on Twitter, leave it in the comments on bookshelfbattle.com, or stop by Bookshelf Battle on Google Plus. If he likes your question, he might even promote your book, blog, other project in his answer.
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