A Biography of The Incredible Mr. Thimbleton (1904-2004)

At age 2, Thaddeus T. Thimbleton the Third was already thirty times more perceptive than most other toddlers. He learned to speak as soon as he was born, and his bladder control was already that of a six year old. By the time he was 3, he could bench press 800 pounds and was drafted by the Roosevelt administration to oversee the purification of the United States’ beef supply. Excluding the Eisenhower years, it was the only time in American history that control of a federal agency was given to someone under the age of 9.

He remained a top politico until a falling out with President Taft after the large man accidentally stepped on Thimbleton’s cherished Robber Barron ~OR~ Captain of Industry? playset, flattening a tin replica of Andrew Carnegie. “You killed Andy!” Thimbleton is reported to have shouted as he ran crying from the oval office (which he partly designed). Although the two parted so unceremoniously and on such harsh terms, they maintained an amicable correspondence in the months preceding Taft’s death, similar to how Thomas Jefferson would send John Adams woodcarvings of himself wearing various hats and Adams would reciprocate.

Once he reached the age of ten Thimbleton was accepted to the Austrian School of Electrics & Granular Dynamics, where he excelled academically despite being functionally illiterate. As an early adopter of Tolkien mythology, Thimbleton was posited at the top of his campus’ social pyramid. Unfortunately (for everyone who ever lived), most of the students at Electrics & Granular were imperialist proto-nerds and were seriously warped by Thimbleton’s interpretation of The Lord of the Rings as Social Darwinist propaganda. Within three months, Thimbleton’s sci-fi book club, The Black Hand, had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand to “preserve the purity of Middle Earth.”

Instead of uniting the world in peace and mutual friendship (as Tolkien predicted, said Thimbleton), the assassination set off a... a... WORLD WAR! No longer welcome in Austria, Thimbleton was forced to retreat to the one nation that would accept him- Canada. Fearing that a recent border skirmish would lead to a full-scale invasion by the United States, Prime Minister Borden had already commissioned a covert nuclear weapons program to ensure Canadian sovereignty. So when the child who invented nerve gas — yes, while looking through the notebooks Thimbleton left behind as he fled, Austrian officials found doodles of cartoon characters in the margins, with complex stoichiometric formulas in their speech bubbles. These formulas turned out to be the blueprints for a refined mustard-based toxin, and were turned over immediately to the Germans, who claimed the invention as their own — when that child appeared on Canadian shores, Borden made him an honourary Canadian citizen and set him to work building nukes.

Thaddeous Thimbleton, age 14

Though the war ended before Thimbleton’s incredible fission machine could be rigorously tested, his research was later cited by Albert Einstein and Leslie Groves as proof that nuclear power was in fact possible at all. Today, Canada’s nuclear program is one of the world’s best-kept secrets, and Robert Borden was exhumed and buried face-down in 1980 by some guy named Phil Brooks.

For countless weeks, I’ve told you all that Roboshrub Inc. would never cave to the utter depravity of what the accursed Google Cardboard People call “Der New Blogger.” I’ve seen dozens of blogs fall before the corporate onslaught, their comments wrent asunder, their most cherished members... lost or... merged amid the mass upgrade hysteria. We managed to stay above the fray by keeping Roboshrub himself out of the mix: if the one who created the blog is incommunicado, the upgrade cannot be pushed. Makes sense to you? It did to us, and we love logic almost as much as Mac users love Linux. It was our grand plan, our destiny to remain on the old Blogger for all eternity; the server was finally ours for the taking!

But all this time—when we thought we were safe—Blogger was actually plotting against us. After systematically forcing our fellow bloggers to upgrade, they finally done did it. They pushed the upgrade on everyone.

Blogs that died years ago are now sporting the new iFrame-based navbar at the top of their pages. And (hah!) in a flagrant display (piff!) of cowardice, the Blogger Buzz site (link) still has the “classic” navbar they’ve denied to millions. Where are your highfalutin ideals now, Blogger?! I guess all that talk about a cyber-utopia was just that; talk. Do those Cardboarders over at the Googleplex have any idea how many minutes it took me to fix my code after their forced upgrade?! And do they even care, those barrel-chested, backwards-faced filter-heads who didn’t bother to tell anyone that this blog was updated?

It’s a miracle that we got the old navbar back up and running. This whole ordeal has been worse than that time George Bush revealed the ending to the sixth Harry Potter book in his last State of the Union Address. He was in the middle of talking about Iraq, and then wham. “Dumbledore dies.” Simple as that, it was the day my childhood truly ended, and why I can never watch CNN again.

So... now that we’re on the new Blogger, we can’t put javascript in our posts anymore (not that we did, but we could’ve. Now we can’t), we can’t edit our comments to include pictures, that post we made a year ago that deleted wrong and was frozen in time is gone, and my avatar is all squished. But, you know, buck up. Smile. Life’s too short to let the Google and their spiders get your goat.

With the new Blogger, why, republishing is instantaneous! That means... oh, Sweet Glavin! I can do everything I ever wanted to do, but didn’t have the room or time for! Bless you, Google, for your benevolence! I love the Google!

February 31, 2007
Mirror Universe Times

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK— Following up on his most popular campaign promise, Archduke Eliot Spitzer assembled the State Imperial Guard today in preparation for a full-scale assault on Montpelier.

“The citizens of the great state of New York have endured Vermont’s squandering of our birthright for centuries,” Spitzer told reporters at the state-run Press Bureau. “And Douglas’ abject failure to put down the Dean loyalists jeopardizes the security of the entire Northeast.”

Public sentiment for an invasion of the Green Mountain State has been mounting since 2003, when then-Burgomaster Howard Dean conquered large swathes of upstate New York, including the old capital at Albany, in a failed presidential succession attempt. The striking inability of George Pataki to adequately defend the state’s capital, his subsequent capture and execution, and the ritualistic plundering of Albany by Vermont militiamen have all contributed to the declining upstate economy. Although a federal task force subdued the ambitious Dean, the Supreme Court ruled that Vermont was permitted to retain his captured territories under Article IV, Section III of the Constitution.

“That verdict was an insult to the Empire State and the widow Pataki,” the insatiable municipal juggernaut fired back when asked about the ruling. “After we subjugate Montpelier, I look forward to putting Chief Justice Scalia in my personal Agony Booth.”