Sunday December 11, 2005

Museum of Jurassic Vacations

Our friend Rose has made a wonderful find. She was on the subway recently when a woman passed through the car, placing pamphlets on empty seats. Rose expected them to be religious tracts, but she picked one up and discovered something more mysterious: a travel brochure for an imaginary destination called New Ephemera.

The “City of Fleeting Fulfillment”—as the brochure calls it—sits near the Gulf of Water in the Sea of Enumeration (here is a larger map). It is apparently a mecca for the literate, since its original motto translates from the Latin as “people who don’t read can’t be trusted.” The city has seen unrest only once—during the Five Week War of 1987, the details of which are not provided.

All of this is played exquisitely straight. The brochure provides no web address and nothing turns up in Google. There’s just a phone number for the New Ephemera Visitor’s Bureau, which I have now called. I’ll let you know if I find out what it’s all about.