In Kung Fu folklore, villagers encounter animals as a verification rite. Bears. Giant snakes. Particularly aggressive swans. It’s a motif.
So imagine my shock as I watched a paper tiger, right here in the letters section, waylay and attack a local villager in front of the whole town. My eyes nearly popped out of my head! “Where’d that paper tiger come from?” I asked. But when I looked—oh! It’s the same one that’s been terrorizing villagers around here for a decade!
With half the town invested in tiger worship, and the other half in planning fifty-year-long tiger traps—tip-toeing has been the best option for folk with scissors. But now that someone has faced the tiger down and lived to tell the tale, seamstresses are back in command: “Let snip the eyes of lore!”
The tiger worshippers’ and tiger conservationists’ hearts are in the right place—all that matters in folklore—but their hands work for Wall Street, and their eyes belong to Facebook. No one would fall for Constantine Metal Resources’ low rent tiger penmanship—Ones! Zeroes! RAWR!!!—if they weren’t already blindfolded with their hands tied behind their back. But that ‘rawr’ has run out of calculator space: even Facebook users know dirt roads don’t cost “100 million dollars” (pets cat).
Tigers have claws and fangs. Seeing one fills your socks with zeroes—not your head. They don’t leap out, insult villagers, fail math, and yell: “I know the biggest numbers! Climb into my mouth or else!”
Chris Palmisano