Monday, 11 July 2005

An Investigation of Egg-cellent Magnitude

Get out your magnifying lenses, dust off those old detective hats, pull out your silly bubble pipe so you can look like Sherlock Holmes, and grab the nearest M.D. or D.O. named "Watson." It's time for some investigative research! Almost everyone with the capability for abstract thought remembers this historical notice, but in case you don't remember...

"Humpty Dumpty" by Mother Goose

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

What a sad little tale. A nice ovoid guy goes up and sits on a wall, falls off it and sustains mortal wounds despite the best efforts of the king's equine and human associates. The egg man has bought the farm.

But let's look at this tale a little more closely, shall we? This Humpty fellow is an egg. Eggs are fragile little things and are often subject to mental instability and are frequent victims of assault crimes & drug problems. Why? They crack, get beaten, and are then scrambled. Humpty would make the perfect victim of a criminal bent on severely injuring someone.

Mr. Dumpty was sitting on a wall when the famous incident occurred. Ordinarily, this wouldn't seem like much of an issue because any building has a wall. Mr. Dumpty could have been sitting on a castle wall, a fortress wall, a church wall, or a porch/balcony above the ground floor of a house, cabin, cottage, apartment building, condominium, timeshare, dormitory, barracks, hotel, motel, or hostel. However, artists' renderings (two examples seen below) hint that Mr. Dumpty was not sitting on these. No, he was probably sitting on a stand-alone wall similar to the brick types that Mr. Charles Brown and Mr. Linus Van Pelt are often photographed conversing over, only a bit taller (the wall, not the two children with unusually large heads). If this is the case, it begs other questions: how did Mr. Dumpty get up there? Neither of these paintings include a means of scaling the wall.

The egg man then falls down, incurring severe exoskeletal lacerations/fractures and intense bleeding, spilling out albumen and yolk all over through the badly-cracked shell. Despite treatment by the king's horses and men, whom we'll assume are the finest medical professionals around during Humpty Dumpty's era, Mr. Dumpty dies from his mortal wounds. We'll assume he was given a stately funeral and proper burial if he was familiar with the king.

Therein lies the next question: how familiar was Mr. Dumpty with the king? The king sent his horses first to treat Mr. Dumpty's injuries. Lacking opposable thumbs and the fine-tuned dexterity of human hands, they probably only exacerbated the injuries and left a fine mess for the human doctors to treat. Poor Humpty Dumpty was probably dismembered in the process of the medics attempting to save his life. What a gruesome sight, indeed.

A likely cause is the Mafia, possibly in cahoots with the king. Two men were observed engaging in suspicious activity near the crime scene, only calling themselves "Vinnie" and "Johnny Elbows." They kept mentioning two other names, "Fat Sal" and "Tony Pajamas," known Mafia bosses seen in foreign restaurants listening to cheap piano music. The king, while not suspected of being involved in the affairs of the Mafia, hasn't sent the police forces after the Mafia when anything shady has occurred. But the king's horses damaged the body and stomped the surrounding area near the wall BEFORE the men arrived, covering up critical evidence and saving the hinds of the perpetrators. This gave Mr. Elbows and his single-named friend a chance to get away from the immediate vicinity.

The conclusion? The king, seeing Mr. Dumpty as a political enemy and capable of a coup d'etat, paid the Mafia to "knock off" Mr. Dumpty. Fat Sal and Tony Pajamas, paid a large sum of money to get the job done, told Mr. Dumpty to wait on the wall and provided him with some means of getting there, possibly a crane, cherry picker, helicopter, or ladder, extension type. Then the two bosses sent Vinnie and Johnny Elbows to push Mr. Dumpty off the wall, causing near-certain death. Then to be certain, the king dispatched the finest men in husbandry to "investigate," having the horses stomp Mr. Dumpty to destroy the crucial forensic evidence. Then the men "attempted" to mend Mr. Dumpty's injuries. An open-and-shut case, based all on circumstancial evidence and speculation! The king's and the four other men involved are all charged with first-degree ovicide. Only problem? This notice is centuries old and predates the Internet and blogs by several hundred years.

Currently Listening Chanticleer: A Portrait By Gregorian Chant, Tomas Luis de Victoria Ave Maria see related

Comments(6)

All important questions worthy of investigation. While there appears to be no easy way up for such a rotund fellow we must wonder what was going on behind that wall. Perhaps the way up was disguised from the back? It is also possible that the artists who drew these pictures took no small about of artistic license. Do you really think that this eggish fellow was happy up high on a wall? I doubt he enjoyed being on that narrow escarpment since eggs are not know for their great skills of balance.

chickenlittle27

Wow.... what's a hostel?

dorothygale27

Well Becky, I have an answer to your question! According to Dictionary.com...

hos·tel (hstl) n. 1. A supervised, inexpensive lodging place for travelers, especially young travelers. 2. An inn; a hotel.

I'm surprised the Angela didn't have the answer so quickly! She is, after all, the Dictionary too!

Major_General_Music

I knew that word without use of other word explanatory conduits. It is often used in the sort of books I like to read... I read a lot.

Becky... as the Python Quote goes: "You make me sad."

chickenlittle27

Now now, I will have no flaming on my Xanga. Take it outside, you two!

Major_General_Music

Can you delete random comments?

dorothygale27