On Friday Nov 4 Typing Monkey Int'l, the gloabal syndicate that owns Typing Monkey Industries, which in turn has among its holdings The Typing Monkey, decided to "enact cutbacks."
That's rich white guy code that translates roughly to "Odin's Beard! It's midway through the second quarter of our fiscal year and we're bleeding money. Let's fire employees and sell off anything that's not turning a profit."
To his credit, our publisher, S.L. Kreighton booked time with the TMI board of directors to make his case for preserving The Typing Monkey. There were PowerPoint decks, spreadsheets with pivot-tables, a reminder that we're the only TMI entitiy that requires our mailroom staff to become Six Sigma black belts.
We lost the helicopter -- the helipad on the roof of our Seattle office has been turned into a community p-patch which sounds eco friendly and responsible but is nothing more than a tax write-off wrapped in good PR. There were layoffs and most of the editorial staff has been bumped to freelance status so TMI can avoid paying for benefits.
We no longer enjoy free Bumble Bars in the snackateria, coffee is now 15 cents a cup and the company-subsidized Classic Cinema and Cognac Club has been disbanded.
Kreighton convinced TMI to keep him on under the title "advising editor" and we retained a small support staff and our intern Eileen.
We apologize for the break in publication and will soon be back to providing you with our usual amount of pop-culture navel gazing, links to the best content on the Web, and pictures such as this one:
It's a poster by artist Albert Gantner, crafted in 1910 to protest the ban on Absinthe in Switzerland. A Christian zealot has stabbed the Green Fairy in the heart and stands victorious over her corpse. Please note that the jaundiced murderer is male and clothed in repressive garb resembling that of the Puritan.
Traditionally artists depict the Green Fairy as an etheral woman recalling the Greek muses, or sometimes with wings like a sprite. She is the mascot of the alcoholic drink, embodying the purported hallucination-inducing properties of Absinthe.
Gantner retains her green-toned flesh here but she is not a transluscent apparition. She is nude save for stockings and shoes of the sort we imagine may have been worn by Victorian courtesans. But that's pure speculation on our part.
The order-craving male has slain the chaos-welcoming female, austerity has triumphed over a good time, the buzz has literally been killed. We are funny monkeys.
