The Heart Attack Machine







From time to time, the ebb and flow of the news tides wash up a certain kind of detrius which we pick up and file away because they remind us of Richard Farnsworth (not his real name), a kid from our freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, yo these thirty years ago. Tidbits like the death which tragically cut short the Papacy of John Paul I, and now, 26 years later, the “merciful” heart attack which spared the most recent Pope a prolonged and undignified period of incapacitation before expiring.


Young Farnsworth was full of vim and bizarre ideas.  His field was electromagnitism, and was always ranted on about phased projection of electromagnetic fields and whatnot. Quite frankly, the young Dowbrigade understood nary a word, which was not suprising, seeing as our field at the point was psychology, which we dropped as soon as we figured out that everyone in the Psych department was clinically psycho and mostly just trying to figure out why. The next year we changed to Anthro, which we found much more sane and outward looking.


But we digress. By November, it had become appearant what Farnsworth