Season 11, Week 7, "Feckless"
THE FECKS
Professor Albert Smithson, chair of the Cryptozoology Department at the University as well as its only member, was in the middle of a long slump. Once a shining star in the field, he had been named “Most Likely to Find Bigfoot” by Missing Link Magazine, but that was years ago, following his groundbreaking paper on the coffee preferences of the Seattle urban sasquatch. Now, with all the budget cuts, the Trustees had made it clear: publish or perish, and they were hoping for perish.
“What I need is a vacation,” thought Al as he sat at the bar of the Perfect Bistro, an off-campus pub popular with students. He eyed a young woman, who did not eye him back. He felt old and used up, not a good combination for a middle-aged academic seeking a comeback or a tryst.
As he walked home, he knew he had to come up with something original, something that would astonish even the Trustees, who knew as much about his field as they did quantum physics.
Not watching where he was going, Al tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, fell, and hit his head. It was at that moment that quantum cryptozoology was born.
As he picked himself up, he realized that the key part of quantum physics was that nobody understood it, not even the physicists, and the problem with his field was that everyone thought they understood it. Who hadn’t heard of the Loch Ness Monster? Bigfoot hunters had their own TV shows. But stick quantum in front of something and the reaction was different.
“Does anyone really know what quantum computing is?” thought Al.
People respect what they don’t understand, and no one would understand the exciting new field of quantum cryptozoology. Al would make sure of it.
“I know just the place to introduce it,” he thought as he wiped the blood off his forehead. “There’s a zoology conference next week at Stanford.”
“Recent Developments in Zoology” brought out the usual small crowd. Al sat through the standard boring presentations by the regular boring presenters until it was time for the Q&A session. “Blah blah?” asked one attendee. “Blah, blah, blah,” responded the renowned Professor Farnsworth, with a smirk and a heavy dose of condescension.
Now it was Al’s turn. “Using quantum cryptozoological analysis, wouldn’t the opposite also be true?”
The room went quiet. The panelists looked at each other, shuffled their papers, sipped some water, until Prof. Farnsworth said “Of course.”
And so, quantum cryptozoology received Prof. Farnsworth’s seal of approval, just as Al had planned.
“Farnsworth will never admit he doesn’t know what I’m talking about,” thought Al, who proceeded with the second part of his plan.
“What do you think of the existence of feckim hominum?” he asked Prof. Farnsworth.
Al had trapped Farnsworth again. He couldn’t admit he had never heard of fecks, so he responded the way any academic would: “It’s definitely a topic worth exploring.”
As soon as he returned to his office, Al started writing the groundbreaking paper “Fecks: Fact and Fiction? A Quantum Cryptozoological Analysis.” If quantum physics has quarks, QCZ might as well have fecks. An animal no one has seen is no less credible than a subatomic particle no one has observed.
“The feck is the last great undiscovered animal,” Al boldly wrote. “It is a very distant relative of mankind, about 3 feet tall, covered in fur, and walks upright. It can be easily confused with a baby Bigfoot, with its natural habitat along the ocean-land interface.”
As the world’s only authority on fecks, Al found it easy to raise crowdsource funds from the cryptocreatures community for a lengthy expedition to find this exciting new animal, and the Trustees were happy to grant him a leave of absence. “Maybe he’ll fall off a cliff,” said one Trustee.
Al’s research consisted mostly of articles on the world’s best beaches. He tried to recruit an assistant at the Perfect Bistro, where he was either ignored or slapped. Compared to the great expeditions of the past, he planned to take no scientific gear, only a camera, lots of sunblock, the loudest shirts he could find, and some shorts with impressive pockets.
He spent the year zig-zagging between island paradises. Al grew a beard and let his hair grow. He was still unable to recruit a pretty assistant from the local populations, no matter how hard he tried.
The Trustees required regular reports so they would have something to throw away. Al was happy to oblige with blurry photographs of small footprints in the sand, half-eaten discarded bananas, and even one nighttime sighting of the elusive feck. Its resemblance to a large teddy bear stuffed in a Fijian mangrove bush was explained by Al as merely an optical illusion caused by the light from nearby tiki torches and paper lanterns.
As his money began to run out, Al knew he would need to have more to show for it than a crowded passport and a killer tan. He would have to produce a feck. As usual, he had a plan. Also, as usual, it relied on a lot of mega-fakeitude. All it took was some old Halloween costumes and a few obliging children who were willing to work for candy.
One morning the world woke up to the existence something astonishing - fecks. Thanks to the internet and a clever clickbait campaign, the curious and the idle saw the pictures of the first fecks ever captured.
Baby Feck Baby Feck Mother FeckThe initial details were sketchy, but it was clear that this was a family of hitherto-unknown human relatives, and that, tragically, they were the last of their kind. The University’s name was prominently featured; Al’s academic modesty prevented him from disclosing his part in this revolutionary discovery.
Despite nearly world-wide curiosity, details were slow to emerge from the beaches of Bora Bora. Eventually, Al issued a press release on behalf of the University, stating that it was holding the fecks in cages and it planned to ship them back for additional study and public display.
At this point, Al emerged to claim his rightful place as the heroic discoverer of the fecks, but it was to express his dismay that they were in cages. Animal rights groups angrily took up the cause and the next Board of Trustees meeting was broken up by protesters. The Trustees didn’t mind, because they had no idea what was going on.
Al stepped in to save the day. He released a statement condemning the University’s plans and notifying the world that he had released the fecks back into the wild at an undisclosed location.
Al was acknowledged as a hero; even so, the Trustees had mixed feelings about taking him back. “Why didn’t he die?” asked several of them. But Al had tenure, so there was little they could do.
Following his return, he wrote a best seller on his discovery, “Finding the Fecks: A Profile in Courage.”
He was still unable to hire an assistant and his luck at the Perfect Bistro did not change.
At last report, Al was planning a lengthy expedition to find the couthbeast, a quantum relation to fecks. He had not determined where they lived, but he was leaning heavily to more beaches.
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"Mega-fakeitude" -- my wife, halfshellvenus, wanted me to use this word, which pretty much sums up Al’s plans, and I live to make her happy.