The Struggle for Transylvannia Comes to an End

Maybe our friend in the Lithium took his Pentagon for a change, but fighting on the Transylvannian front has ground to a sudden halt. The air strikes, the land invasion, the whole silly thing. “Oops, my mistake”, our Manic Five Star General said. “Sorry about that”.

An eager reader, with his finger on the trigger of his keyboard and the pulse of the Web at the same time, thankfully submitted the following:

Tranásylávaánia (tran'sil-van'y?, -va'ne-?)
A historical region of western Romania bounded by the Transylvanian Alps and the Carpathian Mountains. Part of the Roman province of Dacia after A.D. 107, it was later overrun by Germanic peoples and came under Hungarian rule in 1003. Transylvania passed to various powers over the following centuries and finally became part of modern-day Romania after World War II.

I think the Romanians are still under Communist rule for some silly reason (I don’t just think that, they are, I think). Did someone not tell them about the whole “failed experiment” notion that’s been circulating for the past couple decades almost? About the former USSR and all the beet-starved beauties dying for a chance to visit Kroger Supermarket because of that fact?

It’s not that capitalism has succeeded or anything, it just hasn’t failed miserably yet. A guy that used to work for my company was a political refugee from Romania. He could have been a Trannsylvestite for all I know. But he fled his homeland because he was a computer programmer writing the election software and was told to make “special changes”! You know, just tell Fred (or whatever the Romanian equivalent is for that name) to rig the whole damn thing!

We hired him even though we didn’t develop voting software, with our without the special “customization” features. We hired him because he was a damn good programmer, that’s why. Just to prove it, he moved out to the West Coast and went to work for an Internet company for enough stock options to get rich! Hey, more power to him, I say. Now he can go back to Romania and help his troubled people, who have been haunted by the Hollywood Menace for decades.

I think it is a deep, dark tragedy that Transylvannia was simply absorbed by Romania, disappearing without a trace of its former glory. On the brighter side, I could always set up my own independent nation state and use that name without fear of a lawsuit! I can’t believe they would surrender such a “hot property” as that name. Obviously the Communists are too stupid to recognize the inherent value in such a thing - ask Coca Cola how much they would sell their name for!

But I doubt if Coca Cola has reached Romania, with their iron wall of denial and isolationism that hides them from the rest of world in ignorance (and we aren’t ignorant, they are). The Romanians are clearly ignoramuses (or is it ignorami?) if they would allow such a globally known trademark to lapse into non-use like that.

I’m glad I’m well medicated today so I don’t have some kind of uptake inhibitor mechanism misfiring that causes me to do something silly. Something like filing a copyright and trademark for the name “Transylvannia”, knowing that the Romanians are too stupid to protest. But surely if the Munsters and the Adams family have returned to their roots, they can make their leaders see the folly of their ways. I doubt if Herman Munster is much of an activist on the political front though – he’s too goofy for one thing, and he also belongs to that club that is the opposite of Mensa – what is the name of it again?

I should know, I deserve a membership myself. Someone wrote to say I misspelled the bloody word Falklands, for crying in a shame fest! No wonder Microsoft Word kept underlining it in red all the time. I could blame it on my backspace key I guess. But I can’t use that excuse too often or it gets old, so I’ll save it for now.

With Wolf and the rest of the team at CNN on their way back to the US, and the programming returning to normal again, we can rest easy knowing that at least the economic objectives of the war were achieved. The dictator of Transylvannia, the despotic communist tyrant, is still in power, unfortunately. He and his sycophantic ghouls and henchmen spirits will continue their assault on the American public. It will be guerrilla warfare, of course. What is known in the US as terrorism; what is known in Transylvannia as a spook-o-rama. Or that’s the spirit of the thing anyway.