P E R S I F L A G E

May, 2014

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

James Thurber

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Some Thoughts on the Weather

If you are out and about with any great regularity you will notice that more and more the most prevalent topic of conversation amongst Modern Canadians is the weather.

A lot of people (7) have commented on the perception that the weather appears to be getting warmer. Apparently this is also a popular subject with our neighbours to the South (The United States of America).

Now you may not find this interesting or worrisome but that is only because you have not been paying adequate attention to the content of these conversations.

Just the other day I heard a man explain to another man that this steady increase in temperature is "part of God's plan". My ears perked up and I immediately inserted myself into this heretofore private conversation. “What God?” I shouted.

The man who had made the statement had his chauffeur roll up the window of his limousine and they sped off without uttering a word further. Leaving me pretty much in the dark as to his thoughts on divine motivation.

But I am not so easily derailed as that. I turned to the fellow he had been speaking to, an older gentleman who was pushing a shopping cart filled with bags of something or other and politely inquired "What God?".

He paused for a moment before replying. "I think he said Ahriman".

Now this, to me, is pretty disturbing news.

As you well know from your extensive reading in Near Eastern religions (and Google), Ahriman is a pretty nasty deity and so we can certainly assume that if he is behind this increasing temperature thingy then he is without a doubt up to no good. It does not bode well I assure you.

I guess the one positive or possibly positive takeaway from all this is that Ahriman once spent 3000 years in a stupor so there is a better than 50/50 chance that he will get distracted or nod off or something before his evil plans come to fruition.

Probably the best policy is for us to all do nothing and hope that everything turns out okay.

Hugh Briss

A short excerpt from the spy thriller:

Letter from Riga

I could feel my Enfield revolver slipping in between my cheeks. Sticking it in my waistband had obviously been unwise. And given that my trenchcoat was buttoned and belted tightly, there was little chance of my easily managing to adjust it or, at least halt it in its seemingly inexorable journey down deep into the nether regions of my pants. For that matter it was also incredibly unlikely that I should be able to access the thing if any danger should suddenly arise. Clearly I had not thought this through.

In my defence, I was not at all used to this sort of thing – lurking in darkened doorways late at night in strange cities where I spoke nary a word of the native tongue. Of course, the whole reason I was there was because my superiors were convinced that I was conversant in the local lingo. But that was due to a clerical error, specifically some very poor handwriting, that led someone at External Affairs to read Latin as Latvian. And so here I was, well past midnight out on the streets of Riga, trying to make contact with an agent with the improbable name of Valters Valters.

It worried me somewhat that I spoke no Latvian, or Lettish as it is sometimes known. I hoped that Valters either spoke English or had a really good Classical education. Mind you I was pretty sure that I did not possess the Latin vocabulary for any kind of discussion related to international intrigue or the dangerous rise of Bolshevism and I was even more sure that my political masters had not sent me all this way to discuss the finer points of Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid with a Latvian nationalist.

So there I lurked peering down the street towards the House of the Blackheads waiting for a man whom I more or less hoped would never show. This, this strange night marked, I guess the true beginning of my life as a spy.

Charles Ffrench Maynard