FFWD Weekly
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Mr. Smutty by James Martin As a foulmouthed brat, you were always being told to watch "yr language" and/or "yr Ps & Qs" – so what are the chances of a knock-down, drag-out language war occurring in a province that's home to fiery politicos nique-named the PQ? It's gotta be, like, really small, but that's exactly what's happening in Quebec, Canada, where the Superior Court upheld the law req'ing bilingual signs to showcase French & English at a ratio of 2:1. Further, the court clarified that rewriting English words using a stereotypical phonetic accent does not qualify as French. ("Phooey!" exclaimed restaurateur Frenchy Pete when informed that he'll need all-new signs for his popular chain of Dog & ’Ow You Say? Pony Cafés.) From the wacky world of cryptography (i.e. scrambled language): one of 3 surviving "Enigma Machines" was stolen from a British museum at the exact same second (almost) that the movie U-571 premiered on the silver screen. The big, freaky deal, of course, is that U-571 concerns a group of plucky U.S. seamen who happen upon a disabled German U-boat carrying (drumroll!) an Enigma Machine. Enigma Machines look like ordinary typewriters but – thru an ingenious system of weights & pulleys & hamsters running on tiny wheels – have (nearly) unstoppable powers of encryption. By removing the first syllable of a word, relocating said syllable to a secret location, and adding the suffix "ay," the Enigma Machine helped the Germans baffle Allied Forces w/ such semantic gobstoppers as "ho-ay ay-say an-cay ou-yay ee-say y-bay e-thay awns-day ly-ersay ight-lay" and "ein-may ott-Gay." Thieves swiped the Enigma Machine from a museum at Bletchley Park (site of the wartime efforts to smash the German's fiendish wordgames), and later used the device to draft a ransom note which nobody can read. Fun fact: back in "the day," the top-secret Bletchley Park project was cleverly codenamed "Belching Park." (Later still, "Station X.") I'm prob'ly skipping a few details, but the whiz-kids finally cracked the code and won the war. The Enigma Code in shambles, Sir Winston Churchill praised the masterminds of Station X as "the geese that laid the golden eggs – and never cackled." The codebreakers would spend the next 37 years trying to figure out what the hell Churchill meant by that, and whether they'd been fired. This unsettling convergence of fact (Enigma Machine: stolen) & film (U-571) has law enforcement officials pouring over other summer blockbuster scripts in anticipation of a crimewave. It is believed Battlefield Earth is of little-no threat (nutshell: Hollywood superstar gets brainwashed by greed-cult, disguises self as Rob Zombie to avoid paying taxes), but not so the long-awaited X-Men flick, in which a ragtag group of mutants torment an evil magnetic-powered super-villain. Police depts. across the continent are keeping a watchful eye on local evil magnetic-powered super-villains, should they fall prey to similar attack. "I'm not taking any chances," says Dr. Magnetish, an evil magnetic-powered super-villain based in the Tri-City area who says he just wants to be left alone. "I've installed timers on my living room lights, and asked a neighbour to take in my mail whenever I'm out of town." Finally, lest ye think such wordfoolery is ltd. to N. America, a Viennese chef (a TV celebrity chef, no less) has been found guilty of manipulating his mother tongue, all in the name of increased sausage sales. Vienna takes sausage-making v. seriously, and 12 angry men decided the TV chef's claims of selling "homemade" sausage were false, unless you consider a large factory particularly "homey." The jury also convicted the chef of lying about the origins of his other supposedly "homemade" products, including sports cars & moon-rocks.

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