MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

The most romantic film ever is "The Most Romantic Film Ever", by the Hollywood director W. W. Chailowsky. Filmed in 1936, it deals with a jealous husband who suddenly realizes one day that he is not married. In fact, not only is he not married but he has never exchanged more than two words with a woman, and almost always those two words have been followed by a smack on his cheek. So he frantically searches for a wife before someone takes a look at the New York Vital Records and spreads the word that he is not married. Then he find out how practical it is that in certain cultures single women are required to wear some eye-catching clothing accessory such as a red turban, or to carry a huge vase with yellow and blue flowers whenever they take to the streets. Finally he turns to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s classified section. By this procedure he meets Marcia L. Rockefeller, a young, beautiful and wealthy heiress, whom he marries.

The next day, while the others slept, Wieland left the camp on tiptoe and began to walk the wooded perimeter of the castle. Tieck followed him at a safe distance. At a too safe distance since, as they both circled the castle, Wieland eventually caught up with Tieck. Then, Wieland showed him what he had discovered: scattered around the castle there were ingenious mechanisms camouflaged on the ground. If you stepped on one of them, you pulled without noticing a thread that rang a bell inside the castle. It was the strange noise they had heard the night before. And that is why Danaus had rushed out: in order to meet the woman who prowled around the castle and who Wieland suspected was the fairy he had stumbled upon a few days before. Tieck did not understand anything and asked him to put it in writing so that he could analyze it calmly. Already back in the camp, Wieland informed his companions of his discovery. And Mrs. Schopenhauer summoned the Romantics to her outdoor salon in the cast...

It's getting dark. Karl Humboldt, the Weimar eccentric inventor, enters Mrs. Walsolz's inn and takes a seat on one of the wooden tables, next to the fireplace. He seems to be in a melancholic mood. Mrs. Walsolz notices it, sits with him and asks the reason for his sadness. Humboldt talks to her about his wretched love. He had fallen in love with a foreign woman... and now he has lost track of her. He fears that she has returned to her country. Then, Humboldt beckons to the waiter and orders a beer jar. The waiter throws the jar from the counter and hits Humboldt's head. Mrs. Walsolz reprimands him: "Viktor, how many times do I have to tell you that tables are not served that way?!"  Humboldt is stunned by the blow and, in a state of semi-consciousness, murmurs the name of his beloved. When she hears it, she gets astonished: -What did you say? -Prtzil… Prtzil… My mustached Prtzil… Mrs. Walsolz gets up suddenly: “Viktor, tell Miss Prtzil to come up! Hurry!” Soon...

There is a great variety of sects, all equally pernicious (it is not healthy to be brainwashed, no matter what kind of shampoo they use). But the sect I fell victim to has the added disadvantage that they do not allow you to sleep unless you have good reasons for it. And it is not enough to say "I'm sleepy", you have to have a stronger reason. I will tell you how I fell into the networks of this destructive sect. I was a naive young man in search of the "meaning of life". I had the intuition that in life there must be something deeper than turn somersaults (I must clarify that I worked as acrobat in a circus). Some guys saw me one day snooping around an old bookstore in search of books in which the word "meaning" would appear in the title. And they grabbed me. When I say "grabbed" I do not mean that they surrounded me and grabbed me by the arms, or that they applied a cloth soaked in chloroform to my nose. No. Captors of sects are more subtl...