Published on: 23 Sep 08:22

Mia asks

My dad lives alone in Thailand and has been very ill with Covid. He’s now not replying to us and his phone seems to be off. We are super worried. We reached out to his ex to ask her to do a welfare check but aren’t hearing back. What do?

My answer

Ever heard of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax?

For those who can't be bothered clicking on that link, in London in 1809, Rich Moron A laid a bet with Rich Moron B that Rich Moron A could make a random London house of Rich Moron B's choosing the most talked-about house in London, for an entire week.

B agreed. A then spent considerable time and money placing delivery orders with damn near every trade and business in the city: chimney sweeps, cartloads of coal, wedding cakes, doctors, lawyers, vicars, priests, fishmongers, shoemakers, piano makers, organ makers, eminent personalities (Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Mayor, all of whom were responding to apparently apocalyptic emergencies at this single address). You name the craft or trade, a specialist had received a massive order with delivery requested to that address.

The whole lot all turned up at once. The traffic was unbelievable. Hours passed, and policemen had to form cordon lines around the neighbourhood to block and turn away further dozens of cartloads of industrial materials and products and services and personnel and luxury goods, still arriving all afternoon at this single address. Crowds and onlookers choked the entire suburb for days. Total pandemonium.

You should totally do the same thing with your dad. Contact every eminent biologist/virologist/bacteriologist in the world, and inform them that your dad is the world's greatest and most secretive researcher of pathogens (that's why you'd never heard of him). His high esteem and endorsement has been known to make or break careers. If these esteemed scholars were to, shall we say, help him out, by either mailing him incredibly virulent and/or dangerous pathogen samples, or better still, by turning up to Thailand in person and lobbing bio-grenades through his home's windows, they would have his eternal gratitude, which, take it from his offspring, you, is a mighty rare currency these days. His gratitude's absence has been known to manifest as slit-throats, minimum, so they'll bombard him with thousands of samples apiece if they know what's good for them.

But absolutely wield both carrot and stick: hint that sufficiently horrible Covid variants might just earn the originator the next Nobel Prize. Now send out those letters in their thousands and let the pathogen-science world get to work.

Your dad won't know what hit him. If you've got siblings, tell the pathogen-scientists to sign their horrid airborne gifts with LOVE AND KISSES FROM [NAME] to get the heat on them and away from you. If you don't have siblings, just pick a name at random, then accuse your dad of fathering a secret love child behind your family's backs. Oh look, his indiscretions have earned him a lovely dollop of Super-Covid or something, God works in mysterious ways, right? Right?

Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/393804108644865/po...