For decades, the country of Benzuania has been plagued by drought. It’s people have hung on by a thread, losing hundreds every year, completely at the mercy of their unforgiving landscape.
That was, until the day Kenz Oaken, a former citizen of the country who left to study farming at university in the US, returned to his home four years ago with an award-winning solution to his country’s problems.
Kenz’s special field of study was irrigation, and he claimed he could successfully create an irrigation system that would divert rainfall from a neighbouring mountain range in a notoriously difficult landscape, and thereby solve his country’s constant drought. People the country over said it couldn’t be done, that it had been tried before without success, but Kenz proved them all wrong. His patented irrigation system has been up and running for two years now, and the country’s economy is booming: its citizens are as healthy and happy as they have ever been.
Kenz had a surprising inspiration for his new system.
“My research was in areas that people had never even thought to look before. Many people thought I must be mad to even try, but I knew I was onto something, and my research eventually proved my theories correct. It’s hard to believe, but it actually works. My irrigation system is based on a computer generated map of a human face, in particular Noel Gallagher’s from the British pop band, Oasis.”
“I was watching concert footage on youtube one day, and I was struck by the amazingly deep fleshy furrows across his forehead and between his eyebrows. It was raining during the concert, and the water was just running through these crevices in perfect rivulets, not spilling out once. Nature had evolved the design of his face to efficiently direct the rainwater away from his eyes and mouth, so that he could function in the rain. It was an amazing feat of engineering, to get the water past that huge mountainous nose without getting trapped in the massive forest-like eyebrows. And I realised that the landscape of his face was very similar to the mountain ranges bordering my country, and I thought: what if I could transfer this design to the real world? So I spent years researching how to do it, and when we finally tried it, it worked! Noel Gallagher’s face saved my country.”
Kenz is now pretty much a national hero in Benzuania, but that could soon change into ‘international hero’. Kenz is working with many charities and companies around the world to develop irrigation systems for other drought-plagued countries, and the results so far look promising:
Picture of w:Keith Richards from the w:Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End premiere at w:Disneyland. by Anthony Chu, via Wikimedia Commons
Take Pride Spokesman Clint Eastwood in Carmel River State Park, California in May 2005. Taken from an uncopyrighted image posted on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s web site
“Ethiopa now has the best irrigation it’s ever had thanks to Keith Richards,” says Kenz. “Afghanistan is developing a brilliant system based on Clint Eastwood, although that was a hard one. We’ve had a bit of trouble with Northern China’s system, because we’re limited to using only old footage of Sylvester Stallone, due to all the botox he’s had in recent years.”
Author: Towpilot, via Wikimedia Commons
66ème Festival du Cinéma de Venise (Mostra), 11ème jour (12/09/2009)
Sylvester Stallonne
“My systems work. The future is a brighter place now, and it’s all thanks to Noel Gallagher’s forehead.”
The Sceptical Poet 