Storyline: Barbarossa's Teats

Sterquilinium

L'il Timmy Rompkins was born in the Summer of Affection, August 1966. One year before the Summer of Attraction, two years before the Summer of Infatuation, and three full years before the Summer of Love. L'il Timmy was, like everyone else born that summer, a sort of victim of zeitgeist. Had he been born three years later, he would perhaps have ended up being a commercial real estate agent with a summer house on Martha's Vinyard. But instead, like everyone else born that summer, he had become a research scientist, and a respected one at that.

L'il Timmy's first memories were of dappled green lawns, replete with metal toys in a time when metal toys were enjoying their great victory before the onslaught of cheap plastic shit. Some would say that L'il Timmy's mind was like a metal toy. But those shortsighted fools would be wrong. Dead wrong. For L'il Timmy's mind was far more like a spear of brocolli than any metal toy. Uncannily similar to a spear of brocolli, in fact.

He often thought that it was odd that his first memories should fixate on those robust Tonka trucks and metal robots of gears and wheels, instead of on his beloved older brother Big'un. For the remainder of L'il Timmy's childhood was lived in a sort of orbit around Big'un, an orbit that could not be described fully by the considerable impact of Big'un's physical gravity. And this was most unfortunate for L'il Timmy, for Big'un, while a genial enough fellow, had from an early age been afflicted with an affinity for the occult. Big'un's first real toy was a simalcrum of Thomas Edison's "spiritphone," a device that purportedly allowed one to dial into the phantoms of "Dimension X". In fact, Thomas Edison's "spiritphone" was an early experiment in toymaking by Platudinor Enterprises, and rather than connecting one to the spiritworld, it played a scratchy disk recording of "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers" over and over again.

For hours a day, Big'un would ponder the meaning. What were the spirits trying to say to him? "Their tops are made out of rubber"... was this a metaphor for the elasticity of the mind? Did it refer to people wearing rubber hats (like the plastic helmets of hippy motorcycle riders or the American troops in Viet Nam?) And what about "Their bottoms are made out of springs?"

L'il Timmy, though, was content to sit in Big'un's presence as his older brother pondered these imponderables. And in that long detatched observation, L'il Timmy acquired the patience that would serve him well in becoming the world's foremost authority on biogenesis.