Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Smart paper

No picture this week, or rather, a word picture, a design of a picture, a master plan for the ultimate picture. Picture in your mind a graphic novel that is all one picture, that is a huge map folded up like a pop up book origami that you have to unfold to decipher the incredibly complicated story of myself inventing a time machine and going back in time to meet Winston Churchill to help him beat the nazis, except that I'll offer to help him beat the nazis before the war even starts, before they kill anyone. How will I accomplish that? He'll ask. We'll be sitting in a secret English office with a couple of his closest advisers, this office will actually be in that huge house from Downtown abbey, and we'll be eating scones and tea in the earl's library after the prime minister's afternoon nap, and looking out at that huge fantastic lawn with all the intricately trimmed shrubbery. I'll tell Churchill that I'm an inventor who has invented a time machine and a lot of secret weapons and I want to take him back to World War I to kill hitler and help England win the war before they lost millions of soldiers because even though they eventually won anyway they used up a whole generation in senseless trench warfare and had to give up their world empire after WWII. He is astonished to hear about the world empire so I tell him I read all about it and that England experienced a decline due to socialism and I tell him about Harry Potter and he's depressed and about ready to surrender to the Nazis, and he weeps and calls me a dirty liar and spills my teacup on purpose I'm pretty sure so I demonstrate my futuristic technology to him, showing him that my incredibly posh James Bond suit that he told me was cool when we met and wanted one for himself but now I rip a sleeve and show him it's made of paper. You wore a paper suit in England? He says. Are you insane?  Then I demonstrate that my foot is also made of paper by taking it off and folding it into a paper airplane and sending it flying across the earl's library. He is speechless, and I explain that I can only travel in time by sending my consciousness back to occupy a body made entirely of smartpaper, which I invented when I realized that whenever I told anyone my fantastic ideas that they said it would only work on paper and I thought they were being negative but really they were giving me practical advice, so I invented smart paper which you can make anything out of and sent my consciousness back in time. I tell him that I want to take his consciousness back in time to the Dardanelles in 1915, where he will animate a paper Winston Churchill and advise himself in 1915 how to defeat the Turks and the Germans just like he wrote about in his famous books and he asks me about these and I tell him that after every political failure he wrote all these books demonstrating how right he was about everything that nobody else in the government agreed with and made them all go down in history as fools and cowards while he looked good and he got the nobel prize and lived to almost a hundred rich as a king. He thinks about this and says he can't decide which path to take and kicks me out of his office and I go to Austria in 1911 and show hitler comic books and he writes the first graphic novel ever about the Jews and how much he hates Vienna and how wrong everyone but him is and he establishes comic cons everywhere and dies rich at the age of a hundred and beloved by the world. At the end of the graphic novel after you fold out the last hidden corner of the origami you see a secret code that you can use to make your own time machine

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