I invite you to consider the staggering odds that you and I speak the same language. I, a superior species from a far-distant galaxy, and you, a glabrous hominid of no real worth, somehow share the glorious language of my forechimps, Neecknabian. You know it as English.
It really is quite remarkable. A coincidence of such astronomically small odds, that it almost seems as though its the invention of some fevered writer, yet there it is.
So, what are the chances that we also share a quaint custom, which dates back to your medieval era?
Well, if we share English, why not a holiday?
I should never try to reason with you humans. Luckily, I won’t have to when my Armada arrives.
The simple answer is we do not share this tradition. However, we do have a ritual week in which the foolish are noted. This is called Wanker Week. It’s held in mid-winter usually, but as the Galactic Overlord of my Empire, I had the prerogative of declaring a Wanker Week whenever I want to do so. (You’ll see why when I explain how it works.)
Wanker Week is a week in which the glorious people of Neecknaw pick seven of the most foolish, irritating and obnoxious individuals in the Empire and ritually humiliate them. Nobody is immune, even I, the Unquestioned Benevolent Master of all. (I do, however, schedule and plan the humiliations, so I have only been picked once.)
We have a one-person, 10-vote system. Citizens pick the 10 most obnoxious, idiotic or annoying wankers they know, ranked of course, and from all these votes, we get our Seven Worst Wankers. We go from the least votes to the most votes, and the punishments get more humiliating and lethal as we go up the list. We, too, have reality television “stars”, so quite often the ranks our our Wankers are filled up with them, but there’s always room for A-list stars, industrial magnates, and of course politicians.
My last year as Overlord we had a good crop of Wankers, finishing with a wealthy real estate orangutan with really bad mange (which he tried to hide with a comb-over). He had kind of a catch phrase he used on his reality television show, “You’re Out!” I used this as the theme for his punishment, in which we slowly turned him inside out while a massive supercut of all his uses of this phrase played in the stadium.
Everyone really enjoys it. And of course, it does have positive evolutionary effects.
Next time: What way does water go in a zero-gravity toilet?