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On this Twenty-eighth Day
In the Month of August
Of Anno Domini
One thousand Nine hundred
Ninety and Nine as this
World Reckons its Calendar

Doctor Who
Time Lord
c/o Dewey Cheatham and Howe
Attorneys
Sol III / Tellus Imprimus
Code Neil Armstrong

Greetings and Salutations and the Blessings of the Creator and Lord Over All Creation be on to you and our mutual companions, compatriots, and confreres: Those Noble Time Lords who watch yet refrain from participation.

My dear fellow.

What kind of madhouse is this world?

When you referred me to it and recommended it as a sound place for my studies I took you at your word, yet I find this institute of learning to be a place of utter chaos more suited to the sequestering of the criminally insane.

Come to think of it, it is perhaps for that reason this world and its specie is the one you favour above all others. And no where is this madness and chaos more manifest that at this institute of higher learning: Themis College.

Firstly, let us examine the standards: There are none. Any person can simply walk in off the street, however unlearned or already educated, and ask for admittance. Previous academic standing is irrelevant. So is current standing in the college itself. That is not to say that degree and advancement are foregone, for they are not. It is merely that one is not graded on one's efforts piecemeal, but on one's work as a whole for the entirety of a term. Also, one is assessed as much for context as for content.

Secondly, let us examine the curriculum. Great Power above! What a welter of nonsense. There is a bewildering array of subjects that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, aside from the fact that there is not a single course in the hard sciences. (I met with the Dean of Students and asked about a course in Wormhole Construction. She smiled gently and told me that the only wormhole she had ever seen went through an apple. What is an apple? Ah! -- never mind.)

Still, I find that I cannot fault the curriculum too much, for it is heavily weighted to the study and development of the spiritual, and haven't we both been complaining for centuries of that singular lack within our people?

Thirdly, let us examine tuition and methods of funding. My dear fellow, it positively boggles the mind. When you told me that the society of this world was essentially capitalist, and mass market and economy based, I expected the worst and found worse than I expected. Themis College, however, does not seem to be inflicted with that particular disease.

Harkening back to that unlearned ignoramus who is permitted to walk in off the street: In an economy based culture such as this he is almost certain to be destitute or nearly so; nonetheless he is welcomed onto the campus as a student as if he were the wealthiest person of all. He pays what he is able and the remainder is carried as an interest free loan. Which he is expected to pay back in his own time and on his honour.

To this date, in the reckoning of time by this school, not one such loan has been defaulted. This in a society where former students commonly seek relief from lawful financial burdens before the court and yet are not required to pass into debtors prison.

Fourthly, let us examine the staff. They are, each and every one of them, possessed of a child-like mind. One of them even holds workshops in Frolicking. This I know from having been told in no uncertain terms that I should make it a point to join in each such workshop. (Either that or to begin a steady regimen of prune juice. Why would I do either, and what is a prune?)

The only fault I cannot find in this place is the physical setting for it in the backdrop of this world. Such adjectives as dazzling and breathtaking are entirely inappropriate to the understated elegance of this place. From comments I have heard there are locations at certain times of the day, usually but not always sunrise and sunset, when the view "causes one's heart to leap in the breast like the wild hart from beneath one's hand," but I have yet to see such a sight myself, and consider the description mere hyperbole in a background more suited to quiet meditations than to leaping breasts. I even went so far as to say so to a fellow student, hight Russ Jernigan. (What, if anything, is a baywatch?)

Well and good. I have chose to study a course in self-expression. At the moment, many of this world's peoples communicate via "webpages". An audio/visual medium that is a blend of text, photographs, or "video" and sound files. Most of it badly formatted or poorly written.

One of the past modes of communication involves portraiture of astounding impact. There is, for instance a "pre-raphaelite" work of two women behind a low wall. They are the Lady Gabrielle and her lover the Duchess De Villiers. Gabrielle is a blonde, and the Dutchess a redhead. Handsome women both and well endowed in the mammaries. They are naked above the wall and Gabrielle holds the Duchess's right nipple between her fingers.

Speaking of breasts which leap as the wild hart, that is one provocation you would normally expect to elicit a rather startled reaction, yet the look on the face of the Duchess De Villier is more reminiscent than anything, of an expression of, "don't you look at me with love in your eyes and sex in your heart."

Still and all, the eroticism is striking. (I do not have to ask who Raphael is, by the way, as I have seen him on a forum of the electronic media. Television. How a mutant turtle who lives in a sewer could develop such powerful talent when still only a teenager that all previous works are considered an anterior age, and why he'd stay there, is beyond me.)

However, the aspect of this course which interests me the most is that of maximalist expression via minimalist transmission. That, for I have been told upon occasion that my circumlocutory style is counter-intuitive.

With that in mind I shall close this missive without my usual encomium, but instead with an economy of word that ought to be the envy of any tight-lipped throwback.

Anon.

Sincerely yours under the Guidance of That Which Oversees All and One Who Walks in the Light of Knowledge and Learning,

The Papalist

Copyright 1999, 2001 Michael Nellis