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
frequencies or 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.
M. Vincent van Mechelen
70.MNE
|
To better understand what inspired this short story it may be worth
your while to read my poem
Russian Gas
as well.
It was self-published almost exactly one year
earlier.
More interested in rainbows, in Russia or
elsewhere?
Then (also) read my poem in rainbow rime
In the Course
of Time.
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
[
Cǎihóng bú huì líkāi].
(On 1 April 2014, the Dutch newspaper
Het Parool
published an article about it by Roos van
Hennekeler, titled "
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.)
