Somewhere In Time...A Commercial?

Got a bone to pick with this entry?

I recommend the humerus.  Though, the tibia is five letters, three syllables...a lot for your bone budget.

Undigressing, what follows here has nothing to do with bones.  Perhaps. 

My local radio station does something weird on Saturday nights: they broadcast a show called "Somewhere In Time", featuring the radio show of Art Bell, from 10-15 years ago.

Mebbe reruns are cheaper than having a real time show.

Anyway, the rebroadcasted show for this past Saturday was from July 2, 2002. And it featured a story that the Vatican has in its possession, has used, and is hiding, a time machine.  No, not a fancy cuckoo clock that does ‘Hail Mary’ in place of "cuckoo!!"; a thing referred to as a "Chronovisor". The claim is that this device – like a TV set – can be set to a certain time and event, and allows the viewer to see things as they actually happened, or perhaps are yet to happen. 

*Note to Vatican-local convenience stores: if you start seeing bulk buying of party supplies closer to December this year, kindly drop us a line as regards the Mayan calendar thingee.*

The story goes that a person of the cloth – identified as Father Francois Brune – claimed in a 2002 book that a "chronovisor" was invented and exists within the confines of the Vatican.  The claim is that the device had been built by the Italian priest and scientist Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti, in part with a group of eminent scientists in the 1960s, and this television-like device could view events of the past, as well as focus and track specific people.

Coming as no surprise, Ernetti lacked hard evidence for his claims to have helped built this device, and having seen it actually work. For instance, Ernetti claimed to have observed, among other historical events, Christ’s being crucified by Bill Maher on HBO.

Which in itself is no big thing; those few among us who can stomach Bill Maher have seen that.

Using the chronovisor, Ernetti claimed to have witnessed other scenes from history, such as:

- the performance of a play in Rome in 169 BC, depicting a presidential candidate asking donors to give their wedding, anniversary and birthday gifts to him, prompting the overthrow of the candidate, to be replaced with an inflatable Caesar, stolen from a local pizza chain store;

- the building of Egyptian pyramids by aliens from the planet Alpha Centuri, after Artifacts Builders Local 101 went on strike to demand the right to not walk like an Egyptian while carrying large blocks of stone;

- of an ancient AlGore being tossed from Noah’s Ark, for claiming that the 40 days and 40 nights of rain were due to human-caused global warming, that the Ark wasn’t union-built and therefore wasn’t up to OSHA standards, and finally for having tried to have sex with a unicorn after insisting that meth and wine were "experience enhancing";

- settling the long time debate about where the mythical Ark of the Covenant is: it is crated up in a huge government warehouse, with a stenciled note "Do Not Open Until We Figure Out How To Keep the Sand Inside From Killing Us".

- the sinking of the RMS Titanic, not by an iceberg as long believed, but by an alien U-boat that mistook the luxury liner for an attacking seaoppottomus, an aquatic creature of dubious antecedence from the alien’s home planet.

Granted, this story is ten years old; but that hasn’t allowed it to fade away entirely. In fact, in an Election 2012 twist for conspiracy theorists, it is believed that representatives of the current potus are negotiating with the Vatican to (a) admit they have this chronovisor and (b) to let the potus campaign look ahead to November, so they can see how many dead voters they need to register to alter the outcome. The sticking point now is over the administration’s mandatory contraception edict, and the fact that most of the monks – after seeing pictures of Sandra Fluke – argue that she is the posterchild for abstinence, rather than contraception.

This point caused Nancy Botox Pelosi to bloat like a puffer.

Does the Vatican have a ‘time machine’ hidden away in the alleged ‘vast catacombs’ beneath the sprawling Vatican City complex?  One capable of looking into long-lost epochs of the past, to obtain definitive answers to long-pondered questions about no-longer-extant antiquity?

I asked my pet rock, Seymour; about the existence of the chronovisor, Seymour gave me one of those patented 'shrugs' that only a pet rock can give.  As for what might the Vatican have in the way of secret tunnels and catacombs, I thought Seymour might have some insight there, what with his having been indigenous to that region at one time in his 4.5 billion year history.

Unfortunately for folks eager to have this conspiracy theory factualized, Seymour’s of no help: he reminded me that he was there well before Vatican City was conceived. Indeed, when Seymour was last in the vicinity, reporters for the Rome Imperial Times were discussing the economic pros and cons of a visiting field general, known as Hannibal: how his eminent domain policies were ruinous to the small businesspersons from Umbria to Bruttium; on the other hand, how he was a boon to job creation, especially among the Roman legions, which experienced enormous job growth during his period of being --  in the words of one Roman senator -- "a Carthaginian pain in the ass" (from 218-203 BC).

Seymour does suggest, however, if one recalls the subterranean expanses noted in movies like From Russia With Love and the Indiana Jones series, it is reasonable to expect that the Vatican has all sorts of "goodies" stored away beneath their enclave.

Such were the headlines 10 years ago, "Somewhere In Time".  Which I don't think I'll listen to any more of; not after hearing about how a person from New Mexico claimed he was kidnapped by aliens, was taken aboard their space ship, whisked away to an alien world, and forced to appear on an alien TV talk show, Oprahtoid....The alleged existence of the chronovisor has fueled a whole series of conspiracy theories, such as that the device is hidden away in the vast catacombs beneath the Vatican and is actually used there by a special sect of monks to secretly wager on Super Bowls in Las Vegas a year in advance, as a way of maintaining a ‘slush fund’ for the monks to keep well supplied with Beano, so their diet doesn’t require them to increase their carbon offset budget.