Tuesday 14th March 1995
(C) JIPsoft


            A slightly curious story


I had never seen that face before, but straight away I knew it meant trouble.
Well, it was not strictly speaking a face, but a face was the closest thing
that sprang to mind when I saw it.
  The face, if you can call it that, of course appeared off my telephone. It
actually burst out of the receiver and floated there, completely stationary,
and seemed to be completely immune to all my futile efforts to somehow remove
it. Well, I thought a handkerchief wouldn't scare it anyway.
  As I was not taking any notice of the face, it began to speak. It seemed
strange to me, because I never knew a face of that kind could emit any sound.
It was speaking in a language I couldn't understand, but it didn't matter,
because I counted all the words it didn't say, and substracted them from my
List of Each and Every Word Used by Anyone Ever. Then I could figure what it
said.
  What the face said was that I should have a most dry dictator tread on my
gruesomeness. So I looked back on my Catalogue of Dry Dictators, Volume One:
Att-Hit.
  I selected Attila from the first page and pressed the button. In exactly the
kind of flash cameras don't use, a depressive kangaroo appeared and gave me my
Attila before leaving.