The Fairy Factoid©
by Andrew Barriger
| On the trail of
Michelangelo's "gay" organ Part Two Editor’s Note: A certain member of the Factoid staff has been letting his personal activities interfere with the preparation of this vital piece of journalistic verisimilitude. We were forced, against our will, we assure you, to push back the expected essay on Michelangelo's gay organ. However, to keep you, dear reader, from believing the rest of the team to be resting on its collective laurels, we offer this excerpt from a conversation between this writer and staff researcher Daniel. For those of you with memories not so great as ours, a moment to recap. In our last installment, the All Seeing, Yet Unseen Editor had made a special request of the Factoid research team. He wanted to know what organ the great artist Michelangelo had identified as being responsible for homosexuality – the “gay” organ, the holy grail of biological science. While secretly snickering to ourselves, the team leapt with great abandon into the fray, traveling far and wide to answer this most critical of questions. And so it was that I sent Daniel, my most trusted correspondent, to none other than Michelangelo’s favorite haunt, the Vatican, to find the answers. I gave him a tight deadline, but I knew he’d pull through. At the home office in Ferndale, Michigan, my phone rang in the early evening. “Where have you been?” I asked. On the other end, Daniel waited to give his report after several days incommunicado. “London,” he said. “London? I sent you to Rome.” He sighed. “Yeah, those darn Catholics wouldn’t let me see any of their stuff. Turns out they don’t like people like me.” Catholics…two thousand year old party poopers. “Gay,” I said, the answer obvious. “Protestant,” Daniel clarified. Worse. “Oh.” “So, I found out there was an archive at the British Museum. I have connections there, so Deirdre and I headed over on Eurorail to have a look.” Leave it to Daniel, ever the resourceful one. “Did you find Michelangelo’s gay organ?” I asked. “Well…let’s just say I’m still researching.” Huh? “Daniel, why am I suddenly nervous?” Daniel was only vague when he was up to something, and usually I was the one who did the conniving for the team. “It’s your nature. The editor was wrong, you know.” Did I just feel the earth tremble? Hope not. “He was?” “Yeah. All the famous anatomical drawings were from da Vinci.” Well, at least they were contemporaries of each other, I thought. “Really?” “And there are a lot of them. I sent Deirdre to work on the translations between her tennis matches. We have a couple candidates.” Whew. Didn’t need the editor breathing down my neck any longer. “When will you know for sure?” I asked. “Next week.” Crud. Next week was going to be awfully busy. I decided it was time to test Daniel’s writing skills… “Can you draft an article and just send it along?” Delegation, the mark of a good manager. “You don’t want to write it yourself?” “I’m…otherwise occupied.” I’ve never been good at lying on short notice and Daniel was a keen investigator, after all… “Eh-hem?” Quick. Think. Uhhh… “Gotta go. Can’t wait to see it.” “Andy, what is going on over—” at that point, the signal was mysteriously lost. Another week. Not the best news in the world, but the Editor would be pleased to know we’re making progress…I hope. I wondered briefly over Colin and the rest of the team, searching for vampires. No one had heard from them in a while. Maybe they found some… The Fairy Factoid is extensively researched and painstakingly presented by Andrew Barriger , author of Finding Faith and the newly published sequel, Finding Peace . Neither the author nor the editor is responsible for any factual errors that may be contained herein, not that there were many facts this round anyway. |
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And for
fans of those books, you will be interested to know that before the
year is up, Andrew will be bringing out his first of many science
fiction novels, Page 5