Anybody need a good chuckle? Forward from a trading book I'm reading.
The name of the book was The Big Board..... It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extraterrestials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.
These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and commodity prices along one wall of the habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on earth. The creatures of Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on earth., and that it was up to them to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to earth.
The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo--- to make them jump up or down and cheer, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or feel as contented as babies in their mother's arms.
The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the president of the United States had declared national Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that, They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl. It worked. Olive oil went up.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse Five
So.... which planet are you on?
CD |
