Monday, April 10, 2006
The Things you see in Grand Central Terminal (#1)
Vanderbilt Hall, the great advertising annex of Grand Central Terminal plays host to such auspicious occasions as New York's Tartan Week (promoting Scottish Tourism), the World Women's Squash Finals, Bride of the Year and many others. None is more pretigious however, than the bazaar of the bizarre that constitutes it's Christmas Fair.
Passing though late last December, of an evening on the way home from work, I happened to note a large burly security guard, standing to post, guarding the rhubarb of sundry assorted paper weights, novelty ties, music boxes, geodes, scarves, string puppets, glove puppets, puppet puppets and you get the picture.
So anyway, I was wandering through and threw a friendly jerk of the head at this security guy, and noticed that his badges of office indicated he worked for, and I kid you not, Troy Security.
So I approached.
"How come you guys are still in business after that fiasco with the wooden horse then?", I inquired. He denied all knowledge while looking over the top of my head and not acknowldgeing me. "You know", I insisted in a pally, conspiratorial fashion. "Not a very good advert for your firm is it? I mean getting duped by a large wooden horse right outside the gates? Seems a bit obvious?". At that point he cricked the considerable bulk of his neck to his shoulder radio: "Control, we have a bogey in sector alpha-phi", and the next thing I know I'm spending 3 months in Guantanamo.
When I got out, I decided to look into the investigative findings of the "Troy Wodden Horse Commission", an enormous tome produced by the Senate Protected Un-Trojan Activities Comission, or SPUTaC, as it's known. Let me tell you the findings both shocked and shocked me. It was a trip through the looking glass into a murky world of myth, half myth (which is 150% myth if your counting), butterscotch rum flavour rippling, and the murky shadowy underworld of intelligence services and counter intelligence.
Well it turns out that the whole debacle resulted from a failure of the inter-operability of the intelligence agencies that handled security inside and outside of the Gates. The intelligence services and military where withall of one of the most ruthless and brutal empires the world had ever seen was simply taken aback at the sheer simplicity and callousness of the whole hide-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-and-pop-out-later idea.
Ands there was I thinking all along it as because they'd swiped Helen's behind out from under the greeks before there king could pork her. Yet again my overly simplistic world view has failed me miserably.
Passing though late last December, of an evening on the way home from work, I happened to note a large burly security guard, standing to post, guarding the rhubarb of sundry assorted paper weights, novelty ties, music boxes, geodes, scarves, string puppets, glove puppets, puppet puppets and you get the picture.
So anyway, I was wandering through and threw a friendly jerk of the head at this security guy, and noticed that his badges of office indicated he worked for, and I kid you not, Troy Security.
So I approached.
"How come you guys are still in business after that fiasco with the wooden horse then?", I inquired. He denied all knowledge while looking over the top of my head and not acknowldgeing me. "You know", I insisted in a pally, conspiratorial fashion. "Not a very good advert for your firm is it? I mean getting duped by a large wooden horse right outside the gates? Seems a bit obvious?". At that point he cricked the considerable bulk of his neck to his shoulder radio: "Control, we have a bogey in sector alpha-phi", and the next thing I know I'm spending 3 months in Guantanamo.
When I got out, I decided to look into the investigative findings of the "Troy Wodden Horse Commission", an enormous tome produced by the Senate Protected Un-Trojan Activities Comission, or SPUTaC, as it's known. Let me tell you the findings both shocked and shocked me. It was a trip through the looking glass into a murky world of myth, half myth (which is 150% myth if your counting), butterscotch rum flavour rippling, and the murky shadowy underworld of intelligence services and counter intelligence.
Well it turns out that the whole debacle resulted from a failure of the inter-operability of the intelligence agencies that handled security inside and outside of the Gates. The intelligence services and military where withall of one of the most ruthless and brutal empires the world had ever seen was simply taken aback at the sheer simplicity and callousness of the whole hide-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-and-pop-out-later idea.
Ands there was I thinking all along it as because they'd swiped Helen's behind out from under the greeks before there king could pork her. Yet again my overly simplistic world view has failed me miserably.
# posted by Flann O'Brien @ 10:36 AM 
