We've Been Found, All Is Lost...

I confess:  I bought laundry and dish detergent online and had it shipped to Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in Tête de Hergé (très décédé, d'ailleurs).  Maybe you think that my purchase is less scandal and more laudable frugality.  That would be nice of you.  However, even though both detergents pass muster as being very green (the Seventh Generation Free and Clear line) and extraordinarily cheap (I found it at a price cheaper than Tide and less expensive than its green cousin, Country Save) -- can I really justify the carbon footprint of having had it mailed to us?

Doesn't that muddy the green to a faded, dingy Chestnut?  Antique Brass?  Beaver? Copper?  Fuzzy Wuzzy?

Oh no.  And oops, too... *

*   The jig is up.  Our world is forever changed.

Fred just rushed in, all excited like.  It turns out that The Manor, the ancestral home of the Haddock Clan, has been successfully plotted on a Google map.  We were under the impression that this was an impossibility -- but hey! This is a new era:  This is the Corporate Age; We are Beta Testers!  In true muddled fashion, I tried to explain as much back in September:

Sensing a looming depression settling over his beloved valley, The Captain recently sent us a team of motivational speakers, the ideal long distance gift from an absentee ManorLord.  During a cold lunch that featured a perfect mound of tuna salad rising from a Botticellian shell of Boston lettuce -- surrounded by pale green, slightly mottled frozen grapes that were, themselves, punctuated with watermelon and sour cream quenelles -- 

During *that*, we listened to our Plenary Session guru, a self-styled Cicero who could sell Ginzu knives and Veg-a-matics to desert ascetics. 

After changing into the Haddock Corporation's new line of  70% bamboo/30% spandex Ye Olde Sea Salt athletic wear, The Manor's indentured-unto-perpetuity Domestic Staff spent the afternoon doing team-building exercises, often blindfolded, sometimes with various legs lashed together.  At one time or another, each employee fell backward -- full of faith -- into the extended arms of their waiting coworkers (relatives, mostly), in whom they already knew *exactly* how much to trust.

Times are tight everywhere, even in Tête de Hergé. We think that's what is fuelling The Captain's new love of all things corporate.  It's not that he doesn't have almost infinite resources -- good Lord, just look around you!  It is more a question of liquidity.  For years, we ran Marlinspike Hall with the proceeds from collectible comic books and byselling off coveted domaine names, snatched up back in the days before Spielberg had his eye on Hergé's Tête.  Shoot, we used to make payroll thanks to a horse stall full of pristine Bengali editions of King Ottokar's Sceptre, carefully packed in hay.  

The bottom line is that we are opening almost the entire Manor and Haddock family land holdings to the public in an effort to make Marlinspike Hall a self-sustaining endeavor.  The Captain wants to be, forgive the pun, a captain of industry, among other things, and so we find ourselves scheduled to host a series of BigSpeak SpeakEasy MiniTraining Camps, sort of an Outward Bound experience for the buttoned-down world.  Not just for at-risk youth, our outdoor adventures!  

It's kind of a test.  That's right, we're beta testers.

Due to a sheath of confidentiality agreements, I can't divulge everything that Corporate Haddock has been doing on the Manor Site, but has terraforming really ever been all that far off a possibility?  We daily praise God that we aren't trapped in some kind of surreal comic-book fiction...

I think our current conundrum -- which, of course, I will clearly lay out for you in a moment -- stems precisely from this corporate urge that Archibald Haddock cannot seem to buck.  We've never been in danger of being found before, of seeing Lone Alp overrun with tourist-types or Tante Louise's delicate early warning system thrown offline by visiting social media moguls.  (Tante Louise and her trusty cell phone constitute the Tête de Hergé version of 911. Reach Tante Louise, reach the world!)

Anyway, yes, we're finally mappable.  Our coordinates have been plotted... not without a few glitches, however.  We are showing up as something odd and I think we are likely in the wrong place.  Aside those issues, it's perfect.

Fred says Marlinspike Hall, its outbuildings (Barn, Petting Zoo, Dairy, etc.), and the manor grounds (from the orchard bordering the Cistercian monastery to the labyrinth) are plotted as titania.  I mosied over to the dictionary as he pontificated, and was appalled to find that  titania meant:

1. The queen of the fairies and wife of Oberon in medieval folklore; or
2. A satellite of Uranus.


Having known me forever, Fred said, without looking up, "No, not the fairy, and no, not another Uranus joke, either." Instead, he explained, "Try titanium dioxide.  Try... rutile."


I've always wanted to be semi-precious (rutilated quartz)!  It does stretch one's credulity, though, to see that Google Maps claims we are situated on the border of Mongolia, but then, maybe we are situated on the border of Mongolia.  Who really knows where these adventures are taking place?  I am still waiting for The Captain's explanation of the wormhole extending from the bottom of Our Algae-Plagued Moat to... well, to wherever the hell he wants to go in his Miniature Pink Submarine.


La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore has been laughing at me all morning.  She just beckoned me to her side with a "come hither" crook of a pudgy finger, only to blast my eardrum with that blasted line from that blasted aria she is forever warbling -- "Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce [blasted] miroir..." -- from Gounod's blasted Faust.  I can't help myself.  I say: "Look, La Castafiore, look!  We've been found, and mapped!  You, Dear Diva, border Mongolia!"