UR will return on Wednesday, June 20

I am making a brief tour of Fnargland, to reassure the tenants and restore order.

Okay, basically what happened was this: Nick Szabo challenged me. In case it’s not obvious, we are both very advanced in our training, so we expanded until we were seven or eight stories tall and pretty much transparent, and rose buoyant to the upper ocean, where like drunk pirates we groped and slashed in the lukewarm shallows. Nick has practiced a lot, but frankly the Force isn’t really strong in him, and he would have been defeated had not his Nine Extraordinary Eunuchs arrived, on their giant black lizard-horses, and enjoined me from the rear.

But before they could pin me down I tossed my sword, Dilaudid, to my left hand and in one great blow smote off my right which bore the Ring of Fnarg, sending hand and Ring together spinning into the sun. At once Nick’s black blade broke me from crown to crotch, but the deed was done and fifteen hours later the Ring exploded in the Sun, destroying it and all other magic rings. (Since that day men have spoken only of the Nine Nine-Fingered Neuters.)

Unexpectedly this event also resurrected all victims of the Ring, including my unfortunate girlfriend, who was understandably cross, but mollified to learn that while women may be attracted to money and power, they are turned off by bad dental hygiene, indolence and an inability to attend to basic household chores.

The downside, though, is that it also brought back a number of bad actors—agitators, frankly—who Fnargland was better off without. So while security remains a core corporate competence, from now on we’ll have to implement it within the bounds of ordinary physical law. We’ll look at how this works when I get back.