Testing the Waters

By Ehud Neor

More good news from the Seine. After a 1.5-billion-dollar cleanup job, it seems that the waters are now too polluted for the swimming part of the triathlon competition. The culprit? Rain. It seems that the organizers hadn’t counted on precipitation, after paying off the gods of the weather by offering them tribute in the opening ceremonies. Good luck getting their money back. I think that it is unfair to blame the rain. It is a pristine liquid when it falls from the heavens. Let’s place the blame where it belongs: the dark festering sewers under the City of Light. Rain is the “big flush from the sky” that shoves that filthy subterranean sludge towards its final plop into the river. You can just see it in your mind’s eye, can you not?

All things considered, imagining it is better than swimming in it. Ask the blue guy from the opening ceremony. He obviously believed the powers-that-be when they told him the river was resuscitated. I hope he finally got the oxygen that he so obviously needed for his own resuscitation. That them/they/what really showed us what “blue around the gills” means. As I am writing this, things are becoming much clearer than before. Remember Mr. Limpet?

Sin on the Seine

As a child watching that movie, I never bought into the transformation scene. Saying “I wish I were a fish,” fall-in and become a dol-phin was too much of a stretcher for me. Now if he had fallen into the Seine, it would have made more sense, would have been more sane. A chemically induced transformation into a super-hero. Where have I heard that before? Oh no, I’m humming again (follow the dangling ball):

E coli, coli, what ever will be, will be

Excremental ecstasy,

E coli, coli.

I feel so enlightened, but still, I do not see myself rowing, rowing, rowing down the river to scoop up some of the good stuff and eat French sh-t in order to grow some scales. You thought she said, “Let them eat cake!” I say something was lost in trans…something.

Now we can comfortably revisit the sloped roof. There too, something was lost in trans (let’s just leave it at that, shall we?). It wasn’t a sloped roof; it was a slopped roof! It was covered in Seine syrup. I would not have sent my agents up there either, unless they already had gills. That’s the reason why nobody stopped the lone shooter. Who’s going to shoot a dolphin on a roof? It’s probably illegal in that part of Pennsylvania.

Whatever. Let’s not get off track here. The Olympic Ways and Means Committee has offered a solution. The triathletes will be wearing swimming trunks made of litmus paper. That way, when the trunks change color, the competitor will know that his head is already in the sh-t, so that, if he wants to remain human, he just needs to hold his breath until his trunks change color again. The flag signaling the winner of the race will be, you guessed it, the local Tri-Color. The winner will swim a victory lap and jump out of the water like a porpoise with a purpose, forming a piscine Arc de Triomphe in the sky.

The issue is this. How do we resuscitate a culture which has dropped its trousers down to the lowest common denominator? Here is my three-step solution that is piscine qua non.

1. Get rid of the paint.
2. Get dressed.
3. Search for God.

Amen.