(Artist’s impression of the computer’s last known thought process.)BEIJING: Senior party officials in China’s communist government are keeping a low profile today following reports that the giant computer used to generate Dalai Lama insults has gone astray.
The 900-ton bamboo mainframe was not in its calculating hall at the heart of Beijing’s Forbidden City, and did not answer when called. It has now missed two meals (of data) and could be anywhere, according to rumour.
A few junior spokesmen made abortive attempts to strike up a diatribe at press-conferences across the capital this morning. But most were obliged to turn themselves in to police, for re-education, when their efforts to fill in for the misplaced machine floundered.
Veteran Tibetan official Ragdi called the Lama a “stinking sedition-spider” and “a vast bothersome loon-baboon” before blushing deeply and being rushed from his podium by aides.
Tibet’s Communist Party chief Zhang Qingli had a crack at characterising the exiled figurehead as “a selfish shellfish with the head of a monkfish and the eyelashes of a buffalo. He has a goose’s ears, a bat’s bladder, the fingers and toes of an otter – a demon otter – er... and the digestive tract of a... a bee?” before he too beat a hasty retreat.
In neighbouring Sichuan Province, a group of judges accused the Buddhist leader of being a “criminal goat” whose “10 000-uddered milk of unspeakable secessionism had given some cause for concern,” while Foreign Minister Qui-Gon Jin telephoned hundreds of journalists individually to tell them that the elderly hierophant was “actually a whale.”
But by ten a.m. the invective had petered out, and no one was available for comment. The only hint at government plans now is terse statement on state websites denying claims that policy will be reversed in light of a simple mnemonic, allegedly scribbled in biro on the back of an old edict.
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