Uncle Fun and Sparky Land

Good news, lovers of happy endings and other types of self-serving closure:

   Sparky has been found, but he’s still lost—if that makes any sense to you. I don’t mean that he’s lost in a spiritual or existential sense—although that’s always been true. I mean that we know where he is, but we can’t bring him back to where we are…not yet, at any rate.

   Right now is when you’d probably like an explanation to begin, so here it comes. You remember that, to celebrate Wernher von Braun’s birthday, Sparky clamped bottle rockets onto the Funmobile and blasted off for parts unknown. (If you don’t remember, you can look it up by clicking here.) When the debris of the Funmobile came crashing down to earth a couple of days ago, we all feared the worst. However, we also knew that if anyone could get the Powers That Be to grant a stay of execution on the law of gravity, it was Sparky. Notwithstanding our optimism, a house-to-house search of the Greater Funsville Area turned up nothing but expressions of gratitude at the news of Sparky’s disappearance. (One place we stopped at has been sending fruit baskets every four hours to congratulate us.)

   Common sense says we should have given up. As often happens when Common Sense chooses to walk away from a problem, Higher Learning steps in and makes the most of whatever’s left over after Common Sense is gone for good. Our resident champion of complicated answers to simple questions, Science Boy, rigged up the CyberMoose (a fascinating invention you can read about by clicking here) with something he called a ‘Sparkyfinderator’. Priming the tracking device with whatever alpha waves had leaked out of Sparky’s head into the lining of one of his old hats, Science Boy set CyberMoose loose on the trail of its elusive quarry. (By the way, why is it that so many quarries are elusive? Surely some of them must just sit there, waiting to be found. Still, it wouldn’t seem right for a quarry to be anything but elusive, somehow…it robs the whole thing of its sporting touch.)

   Tracing a zig-zaggy route through every back alley, side lane and overflow culvert in a ten-mile area, CyberMoose finally came to a dead stop in a neglected corner of the North Funsville Rural Concession Dump. Sitting largely upright amid the other detritus was a Philco television set, 1950’s vintage, black-and-white variety.

   As if bidden by some distant remote control, it switched on…

   ...a picture began to form out of the static.

   To our surprise and amazement, this is what we saw and heard…

   As they say, tune in later for further developments.

Uncle Fun