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The Grand Tour
I had invited them to attend this year's Knox County Fair, but it seems that they were a little early. That is one of the strange things about the Gnxrnrnians, they have gone beyond Einsteinian and quantum physics, making intergalactic space flight like a bike ride around the block. But their arithmetic is horrible. This may be due to the fact that they don't have fingers as such. (Those of you who remember base number systems from high school freshman algebra can stay. Everybody else can go make a cup of coffee during the next few sentences.) Our number system, based on ten, is believed to be due to our having ten fingers. On the other hand (I'll let this one pass) the Gnxrnrnians express numbers up to 23 billion using just a one digit number. The result of this is that making change on Gnxrnrn is extremely difficult. They don't use clocks or calendars either, because they would be too big for the planet. Thus, they can travel hundreds of light-years in a few days, but have no easy way to calculate exactly how few. So here they were, a month and a half early, (OK! OK! I'm not so great at it either) dressed in the yellow plaid burmuda shorts and black knee socks I had given them from the Grumpy Bachelor International Cartel and World- Wide Mega-Monopoly, Ltd's (GBICWWMM,L's) Spring Collection, and as excited as a bunch of kids in an ice cream store. This posed a problem that I had not anticipated. You can't just put a hat and coat on a Gnxrnrnian and pass him off as your sister-in-law's ugly kid. So I decided that the best thing to do is take them on the grand tour of Gambier. Maybe I could pass them off as prospective students from California. First stop on the tour was the Kokosing River. And what a river it is. Napoleon is reported to have called it, "La robinet qui ne marche pas" (The faucet that does not work). Exactly what Napoleon meant by that is lost to history. Why he called it anything at all is even more of a mystery, since there is no historical record of Napoleon ever getting as far west as Trenton N.J. much less Central Ohio. But it's French and it sounds nice. They were interested, but polite about it. Gzat Bzelgrx, Head Hindmost of Gnxrnrn, told me that he had seen many rivers on many planets and this was one of them. This, from no less than the ruler of another planet! I also took them to see the playing fields of Kenyon, the bike trail and red caboose and the recycling center. It was on this last stop that one of my biggest problems; where to take them to eat, was solved. I had just about settled on taking them to Bertha's By The Sea, Inland Italian Restaurant, whose anchovy pizza has been the leading cause of many an unofficial land speed record. It's never very busy there and maybe my little alien friends wouldn't be noticed. But they all went absolutely nuts over the recycling center. By the time they were through feasting, I had to carry them back, one by one to the "Fungal Dawn" and tuck them all in. I set the auto pilot to Ý which is the Gnxrnrnian number for 16,893,420, the distance in light-years to Gnxrnrn, and then lit the fuse. When they woke up they would find themselves safely in orbit around their
home planet. At least I think that's what will happen, I am not that good
at reading Gnx, their native language. One thing I can be sure of though.
Wherever they are when they wake up, they will have no idea what time
it is. George Breithaupt is many things to The Mount Vernon News, but none of them are printable.
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