Vincent van Mechelen
RAINBOW STRAIGHTENED OUT
|
From our Moscow correspondent
RUSSIAN RAINBOW EXTINGUISHED
Specialized aerial applicators extinguished a rainbow close to the
western suburbs of Saint Petersburg yesterday.
The rainbow was sighted by two teachers at the Mary Magdalene School for
Primary and Secondary Education during playtime.
The children were ordered to look at the pavement of the schoolyard and to
return to their classrooms at once while continuing to look down.
The local authorities were immediately contacted, who, in turn, notified
the federal Internal Security and Emergency Service.
Within a quarter of an hour, two light aircraft were flown to the area
where the sources of the rainbow appeared to be.
Each plane fired seven shots of Antikaleidoscopic
Agent, aka AKA, in its direction.
After this heavy chemical attack the two pilots only saw a few scattered
wet, paled patches which no person in their right mind could take any
longer for an airborne object parading all visible colors of the spectrum
in the order of their wavelengths.
Then, the official signal was given that the rainbow was under control.
After the last lessons were over, the school held a short press conference
for parents and journalists.
The headmaster said that he was 200% sure that, thanks to the teachers'
remarkable acuity and the AKA applicators' great resolution, none of the
children at Mary Magdalene had seen the rainbow.
All parents heaved a sigh of relief.
70.MNE
|
To better understand what inspired this short story it may be worth
your while to also read my poem
Russian Gas,
which dates back to almost exactly one year earlier.
About four years after creating this document
i came across a
project by Pink Pony Express.
They have created an app called "
Raduga" in Russian and
"
Cǎihóng" (彩虹) in Chinese, both meaning
rainbow.
While, on the surface, this app does no more than alerting you when a
rainbow may appear somewhere in your vicinity, its hidden message
is that
rainbows are here to stay,
彩虹不会离开.
(On 1 April 2014, the Dutch-language paper
Het Parool published
an article about it by Roos van Hennekeler, entitled "
Kleurig
[colorful]
protest".
The app is presented as 'a subtle comment on an absurd law', the law in
question being the malignantly enacted and aggressively enforced
Russian one that criminalizes, among others, the use of a rainbow
symbol in public.)
