High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.....The Electric Monk was a
labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for
you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television
for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for
you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the
things the world expected you to believe.
.....The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it,
including the Monk itself and the Monk's horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink. This made for a
certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing
anything anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the
immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly
things in its time but was secretly in the opinion that this was one of the silliest.
.....When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be important that they be
instantly recognisable as artificial objects. There
must be no danger of their looking at all like
real people. You wouldn't want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day while it
was watching TV. You wouldn't want it picking its nose, drinking beer and sending out for pizzas.
So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding
ability. This was important. People, and indeed
things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two
legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen,
nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft
and smooth instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just the one mouth and one nose,
but were given instead an additional eye,
making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking
creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.
This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in
one day. It was,
by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously,
and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them,
of course. It didn't have to believe them all as well. This is why instruction manuals are so
important.