“A funny thing happened on my way to the forums,” he begins, “which has left me rather unnerved, or perhaps enervated is the more appropriate term, and as terminology, which is to say taxonomy, has been the subaltern of the matter that has vexxed me so, it were best that there were no confusion.”

“As is my wont, I was out for my morning constitutional, strolling through the interstices in my subjectivity, when I heard from the agora a pedant advertising what he calumniated as a revolutionary new mental tonic. As the Wif has often complained of my flabby medulla, I thought it best to investigate, and not having a committee handy, undertook with some trepanation to beat the bushes myself, which is to say that I sent one of my graduate acolytes into the fray to discern the risk.”

“It seems this oratologist had worked himself into quite a state with his declensions upon the topic of new interactive media and the simulational logics of political engagement. It was with nothing short of wonderment that I witnessed his speech (safely from behind an ivory pediment, I assure you), for his astounding range of neological imperatives was nothing short of breathtaking, and when he did pause to restore his store of expressive media, the plethora of inanities that he spun upon the wind only settled more impressively upon the blank and programmable slate of my memento mori.”

“At length, my unpaid lackey reported that this most inestimable pedadogue was hawking a discourse on the virtual luger and its place within the fractalized matrix of experiential relativity. Amidst the wondrous formations of epiphactual logic was a terribly composting catalogue of the shapes and ships of dynamic methodological aesthetics (and I quote):
 Games that are played with the exclusion of optical inputs
 Games belonging to the ordo novus terrarium
 Chess
 The performative works of Arthenice Bellastrium
 Self-reflexive word-plays (with and without characters)
 Many others too myriad to detail without risk of running into a potential contradiction that may some day endanger the possibility of intenurement”

“Astonished, I was, at the eruditionitiousness of this monocle, and immediately ordered that the unwashed proletariat should sally forth in all of her raiments of orthodoxy and challenge the interlocutor on the premises that as all designers, critiques, and players of entertainments through computational platformization are known to be of the feminine caste, and ergo propter hoc, this man could not possibly know the Gordian paths of which he had bespaken himself. At first, she resisted, interposing a counter-subjectivity eerily phenomenated through doubled speech events as though the stereoscopic rendering of vocalized linguistics could not fail to persevere, but under the relentless pressure of my repetitive recounting of the learned institution’s motto (Obscuratum *hic* Pedagogum), I firmly believed that her recalcitrance to fault in the line of conformity was waivering.”

“It was at this unfortunately imprecise moment that she broke from my side (thank the Gods that it was not my forehead), and thus it is that I have arrived at this entirely disreputable establishment to inquire if you have in fact seen my chowhound. I would gladly give this fin, and begin again, for any leads as to her or what she wears about.”

“That shaggy dog has left the building,” was the barkeep’s only reply.