The Raiders of the Lost Fart

There are many great joys of not participating in the full on rat race. They will be different in details but to TheEditor tossing around useless or gross ideas is one of them. Many of them begin their short uneventful life as "what if" questions.

The other day, it was "what if I wanted to condense my view of current political punditry into a single tag line"?

Thus, "The Raiders of the Lost Fart" was conceived. It combines two characteristics of - for lack of a better term - TheEditor's style, movie titles and grossness.

It is a simple formula matching TheEditor's math skills where counting up to two is easy but anything beyond that gets very hard very quickly. You can see the pattern at work in many of our blog post titles.

In the United States, The Raiders of the Lost Fart are out in force on Sundays on the talk circuit and during the week when something crucial to America happens in some irrelevant corner of the planet, so pretty much all the time.

Chasing forever the ephemeral outgasing associated with humans, The Raiders of the Lost Fart are tricked out in modern easy care, pin-stripe urban camouflage non-adventure gear that generally includes ties for males and purses for the ladies. We are not saying anything about the purses, that would not be nice.

The ties are dual purpose (note the magic number two again), serving both as a decorative status symbol and as an emergency abseiling aide for rappelling down into the deepest crevices of conjecture or into the darkest sinkholes of the mind. Some tend to see imaginary skeletons everywhere, a well known occupational hazard besides tunnel vision from years of navigating the claustrophobic mazes of TV stations.

One very well known American Raider comes to your TV screen wearing a bow tie which can double as a propeller to lift him out of a Jurassic Park size heap of doo doo, thus reducing the substantial dry cleaning bill which is the main justification for the huge salaries fetched by the more experienced Raiders of the Lost Fart.

Other countries, of course, have their own Raiders, dressed in the same kind of uniform pursuing the same ephemeral smells and never quite nailing it down. The latter, of course, is indispensable to the trade, the tight collusion of those who dealt it with those who smelled it.

They will invest their considerable brain power into discussing the nuances of smell, describing it as the smell of apples or oranges, mustard gas or incense, filling the minutes and the hours with vapid warnings, retreating afterwards into their empty studies to plunge into the far corners of the World Wide Web in preparation for the next instalment.

Like in any good adventure movie, there are good guys and bad guys, and people die around our heroes but they continue their quest of the Lost Fart.

Some will stop at nothing to overcome the bad guys. A current affairs example would be that of a youngish scribe who has entered into a Foustian bargain in the attempt to bring down the popular villain known as the Snowman.