#166: Unconditional Love*

Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables

No. 166

Unconditional Love*

The week came and went, and Slothrop’s still here, despite Artie’s prediction. I can see him from my cubicle, in the Committee room, writing on the whiteboard. It’s Saturday morning, or what I used to call ‘Ed time’ in the office. I popped my head in there to say hello, bc it’d be awkward not to. The room smelled like a magic marker factory & the whiteboard looked like the scene from A Beautiful Mind where @russellcrowe ’s wife discovers his crazy-town office. Slothrop looked like he hadn’t slept. He said he knew the Slater-Miyazaki model had a flaw in the algortihm somewhere & he was going to break the whole thing down and fix it. What convinced him was the S-MCSS results for #166, which had 2 versions. The one posted here, which the Committee approved, and one with a long, rambling paragraph of a caption that went deep into the backstory of the guy (Bob) and the dog (Rex), including Bob’s recent divorce and Rex’s issues with being left in a cage all day. (*Apparently Artie and Syd got in a fight after we hung out late on the boat last week, which he smoothed over with some flowers & jewelry, FYI as backstory on the backstory.) Anyway, the rambling paragraph caption came back w an off-the-charts 22.0/23.0 on the S-MCSS, and the one above came in at 9.4. The Committee would’ve been fine, bc both feature a #dog, but Slothrop took a major stand, turned them all around and committed to find the bug by Monday, saying something to the effect of ‘either it’s broken, or people are just idiots’. Either way, there goes my Saturday morning alone time. -Ed.