Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain (30 page)

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   An SST is an airplane that goes extremely fast. SST stands for Super Sonic Transport. Super Sonic means the plane travels faster than the speed of sound, so don't bother to yell out the window at your friends, “I'll be there in a second!,” because you'll arrive before they hear you and it will be a total waste of time.

²³
   “Worth his salt” is an expression dating from ancient times when salt was the most important commodity in the world; being worth one's salt, then, was a sign of being valuable. Since there were no refrigerators, salt was very important as a way to preserve food. Cheese, for example, is just a way of preserving the goodness of milk for a long period of time by using salt to cure it. Not that milk is sick and needs to be cured. Curing is a process by which materials are preserved, such as leather or food. If your food is leathery, it has probably been cured improperly … unless you prefer to eat leathery things, in which case you might be a bit weird.

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   Plankton is a micro-organism that grows in the sea and is a preferred food of whales.

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   I have commenced writing this book and it should hit the shelves of major bookstores in the new year. My editor is skeptical about its possible sales, pointing out that whales rarely come out of the ocean to purchase books, as their skin must be kept moist at all times. And even if they did, most bookshops would bar them from entering because they would splash the books and ruin the merchandise. Further, a whale taking the book back to the ocean to read it quickly finds that the book becomes waterlogged and falls apart. Topping off everything, whales can't read because they are not permitted entry into most schools. So there is very little financial gain to be had in writing books for whales. Still, I do it because I am an artist and I follow my muse wherever it may lead me, regardless of monetary gain.

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Stoically
means without complaint, and comes from the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism, which was practised by the Stoics. The Stoics believed in bearing all trials and tribulations of life with a stiff upper lip, i.e., without complaining. They did, in fact, have extremely stiff upper lips. So stiff were their upper lips that they were often driven head first into the gates of besieged cities and used as battering rams with great effectiveness. In a curious side note, the group actually called themselves the Storks due to their propensity for standing on one leg all day and eating exclusively fish, but they were sued by the Athenian Stork Appreciation Society for misrepresentation and copyright infringement and so had to change their name.

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   The exception to the rule is the Fluffy Mountains of Central Peru. Formed completely of naturally occurring marshmallow, they are not only safe to crash into but also extremely delicious. Recently, the UN was forced to declare the Fluffy Mountains a World Heritage Site to stop hikers from devouring them.

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   Whispering about people is quite rude, but one must forgive the children in this case. Mimi and Parveen were well known in orphan circles and their arrival was highly anticipated.

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   The Mudsquirrels take their name from a local Texas rodent that prefers mud puddles to trees as a place to nest. They are a menace when threatened. A child kicking through a mud puddle might mistake a mudsquirrel for a lump of mud and kick it. The enraged mudsquirrel will use its powerful back legs to fling mud at the face of the offending child. Not fun, especially when the odd nut gets mixed in with the mud.

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   I would beg to differ. The simple questions are often the simplest. For example: Do you want ice cream? Are you going to eat that last sandwich? Is the bear eating my cake? Simple questions. Simple answers. Only some simple questions are profound, like … Why do we live on this earth? Why is there war? Or, Do I look fat in these pants? Philosophers have struggled with these questions through the course of human history. I haven't. Personally, I have better ways to spend my time.

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   A fissure is a crack or crevice. It has nothing to do with fishing. Although some say that fishing in fissures can be very rewarding. Fissure fishing is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world.

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   Shell corporations have nothing to do with shells. They are companies that exist only on paper to hide their true owners and make it too confusing for anyone to investigate their true natures. The name
shell corporation
originates from Central America, where a group of Guatemalan businessmen dressed as crabs and tried to get a bank loan. The bank was so confused and disturbed by the arrival of human-sized crabs at its door that it granted the loan without question to avoid a confrontation with the giant crustaceans.

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   Swiss banks are renowned for their policies of absolute confidentiality where their clients are concerned. The Super Secret Swiss Bank takes secrecy to a ridiculous level. Most of the employees don't even know they work at a bank. Most don't know what a bank is. The president of the bank thinks he's a chair. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, but in the end, the system is very effective.

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Sinister
is a word that has come to mean “evil,” but it literally means “left.” The inference is that all people who are left-handed are evil and all people who are right-handed are good. Of course, anyone can see that this assumption is simple-minded. The only truly evil people in the world use both hands with equal agility and so are called ambidextrous. (Just kidding … sort of.)

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   The Tunguska Event was an enormous explosion in Siberia that devastated forests and left massive craters all through the Tunguska region. The nature of the event is still much debated. Some say it was a meteor strike, others an anti-matter explosion. Still others claim it was children playing with matches, but adults are always trying to blame children for things they don't understand. One very silly scientist from Portugal asserts that the event was caused by an angry duck with gastro-intestinitis.

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   In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries putting on pointy hats and pointing at things while posing for photographs was a time-honoured tradition, especially in Russia where awards were given for Most Rigid Finger and Most Interesting Facial Expression While Pointing at an Object. Sadly, this practice of pointing at things has gone out of fashion because people became very competitive, developing elaborate false fingers to extend the range of their pointing. The practice was banned after, inevitably, someone lost an eye. Mothers around the world were smug.

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   Rasputin was a Russian monk who is blamed for the downfall of the Romanoff dynasty of Russia. They said he could control people with his mind. Whatever powers he may have had, grooming was not his strong point.

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   King Liam is obviously not aware that there was a dessert named after the mad monk Rasputin. It was a giant pastry covered in chocolate and filled with intensely sweet custard. So sweet in fact that it would cause anyone who ate it to go mad. Certainly an apt tribute to Rasputin, but not a quality that would make it a popular dessert.

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Adolescent
is a word that means “early teen.” Adolescence brings with it pimples, irritability, and the uncanny ability to believe oneself right even when one is obviously wrong. Fortunately, adolescence doesn't last long and is replaced eventually with adulthood, which is the state of knowing less and less as time goes on but letting on it doesn't bother you much.

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   The Malinqué Coffee Cartel was indeed a strange group. The idea of Hamish X battling an octopus from a donkey's back may seem crazy but the head of the cartel, Don Pinque Malinqué, revelled in breeding sea animals that could survive on land for extended periods of time. He had several guard octopi, a number of attack lobsters, and a swarm of ninja shrimp.

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   Most people are unaware that the Yeti is a devoted fan of hip-hop. Considering that few people have ever seen the Yeti, it is understandable that its dance preferences are not common knowledge. In a similar shocker, Bigfoot, the Yeti's American cousin, is an accomplished tap dancer … but that is hardly relevant to our story.

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   An operating theatre is a room where medical procedures take place. The name is a holdover from the Renaissance, when all doctors had to supplement their income through acting. They would perform plays that involved medical procedures. Needy audience members who couldn't afford surgery would come out of the crowd to receive treatment. It was highly entertaining but not very sanitary. Some of the best plays from the Surgical Drama Era were
Danny Gets a Kidney, The Tonsils of Julius Caesar, The Tragedy of Lucretia and Her Burst Appendix,
and
Hernia!

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   Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, makes pictures of the interior of the human body using magnetic waves. Before the MRI, pictures of the interior of the human body could be achieved only with cameras attached to highly trained shrews (very tiny mammalian carnivores). Shrews are difficult to tame, and so training was extremely costly and time-consuming. Add to this the fact that many shrews refused to come out of the human body after going in, and the invention of the MRI was long overdue.

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   Forgive me for interrupting this dream sequence, but
foyer
is such an odd word, I couldn't keep quiet. A foyer is the room directly inside the entrance of a building. Many people don't have foyers and so don't know this. I believe this is a great tragedy and I work with a charity organization for the foyerless called The Space Inside The Door Association, or TSITDA. We help bring foyers to those who haven't any. This is a very expensive process, as most homes that don't have foyers must be renovated drastically to accommodate a foyer and so much money has to be raised to offset the costs. Please give generously

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   Amen to that.

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   Probably the Crown Prince Garbonzo of Humnubble, who is known to wear a wedding dress most of the time. He is also said to wear a pointed helmet, and he encourages his subjects to toss doughnuts over the point. He is an extremely silly person.

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   Thank goodness they can't. Can you imagine having a talking can opener? What could it possibly have to say? “The beans are now unlidded!” or “Look at me: I've opened the soup.” Or even worse: a talking toaster! “Hey, the toast is burning, you fool!” And “How dare you put a toaster pastry in me! I'm an artist!” Toasters are truly the prima donnas of the appliance world.

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   The Sultana is not a raisin but rather a female Sultan (a variety of ruler of an Arab state). It would be very difficult for a raisin to give anyone a pair of trousers, as it has no hands, nor does it have a good grasp of the concept of trousers, as it has no legs either. Not that raisins aren't generous: they are among the most gentle and giving of dried fruits.

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   King Stephen, thirty-third King of Switzerland, was a fitness fanatic. Much to the chagrin of his subjects, he closed the elevator and replaced it with the staircase that wound up around the elevator shaft from the bottom to the top of the Hollow Mountain. Children were forced to run up and down the stairs as a form of exercise instead of being lazy and using the easier elevator. As soon as King Stephen left the Hollow Mountain at the age of sixteen, the elevator was immediately reopened by his successor, Gerta, the Chubby, Twenty-Fourth Queen of Switzerland.

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   The thought of a leathery planet is very odd, but a group of cattle farmers from Wyoming became obsessed with the idea of covering Venus in a vast leather coat in an attempt to promote the wearing of leather. They ran into a few difficulties: inability to find a cow large enough to provide sufficient leather for a coat that size, NASA's refusal to lend them a spacecraft, and opposition from animal rights activists.

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   Cobbled roads are made up of many small stones laid together to form a bumpy surface. Not to be confused with cobblers, who make and repair shoes, although one Moghul Emperor ruling in India in the twelfth century cobbled an entire road with cobblers. He was a rather nasty man, though, with a cruel sense of humour.

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   Munster is a small town in Germany. It is also a kind of German cheese and the German word for cathedral. This all points to a time in the dim past when Germans worshipped cheese.

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   Not pinball or video arcades. An arcade in this sense means “a covered passage with shops on both sides.” Of course, the Swiss do love pinball and video games. The first pinball machine was invented in Zurich in 1762. It involved a silver ball being manipulated through the holes of a Swiss cheese using wooden paddles driven by metal springs. On hot days the cheese would melt, and so all pinball parlours were located in cool underground chambers. As a result, to this day all video and pinball games in Switzerland are played underground.

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Pedestrian
is a word meaning “travelling by foot.” The word originates from the city-state of Pedestria in ancient Greece. The Pedestrians worshipped a giant stone foot that they insisted was the foot of the god Zeus. They also dressed themselves as giant feet, wore shoes on their heads, fished out of boats shaped like feet, and travelled around in chariots shaped like giant sandals. The entire city was wiped out during a particularly nasty Athlete's Foot epidemic.

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   The practice of calling bad persons “unsavoury” dates back to London of the Middle Ages, when convicted criminals were forced to walk around the streets dressed as not very delicious foods. Thieves dressed as Brussels sprouts, dishonest businessmen dressed as cabbage sandwiches, and murderers were attired as very unappetizing meat pies.