Jack Manassas and Company

 What follows is a fictional story.  It is not actually true. 1. If you are reading this, Emmanuel Goldstein is dead.  He died roughly 72 hours ago, because he was no longer there to prevent the automatic posting of this message to his blog.  Check the blog anyway– Emmanuel was planning to post an expose´ about some recent discoveries he accidentally made on the internet.  If by some miracle the posting is there, print it out as soon as you can, then turn off your computer and hide the printout.  It will be gone very soon. What follows is a brief synopsis of Goldstein’s discovery, not the full story.  This account is really just an afterthought.  Probably I will find it on my hard drive by accident, laugh a bit and then erase it.  But, cautious fellow that I am, I can’t help jotting down a few notes from my larger study.  A trail of breadcrumbs through the forest may help someone else find the same discovery–unless, as Hansel and Gretel ...

 Whenever we go down to Washington State, we always stop off at Hope BC.  We like the park in the centre of town, the impossibly tall Cascades that surround it– and especially, the wood carvings; A lot of these are left over from chainsaw carving competitions; But at least one of them looks like an authentic Pacific Northwest Totem Pole; There was no signature on this one, no date on which it was carved.  There is a raven with its claws firmly on the head of the being below.  All of the raven’s attention is focused downwards.  And what sort of creature has the raven’s attention?   It is almost a bird, but the beak is not long enough, and the carving of the shoulders and chest suggests fur.  Yet it is not a bear.  Possibly an ape of some sort, or a Yeti.     It has a waist, and could be a woman, but the deep-set eyes in the chest, where the breasts would be, make this questionable.   The face coming out of the chest i...