Election updates

The Curious Case of Mr. Tenk, originally uploaded by galacticbaroque.

Over in New Babbage, election season continues to grind on the nerves of the citizenry. As of this writing, candidates are the outsider Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, Babbage newcomer and entrepeneur Aeolus Cleanslate, and the reclusive clockwinder Mosseveno Tenk, finally down from his attic.

If you are not familiar with P.E.M. jokes, you may wish to take a look here.
My favorite one goes like this:

Psychologists subject an engineer, a physicist, and a topologist to an experiment: Each of them is locked in a room for a week -- hungry, with a single can of tuna fish but without an opener; all they have is pencil and paper.

At the end of the day, the psychologists open the engineer's room first. Pencil and paper are unused, but the walls of the room are covered with dents. The engineer is sitting on the floor and eating from the open can: He threw it against the walls until it cracked open.

The physicist is next. The paper is covered with formulas, there is one dent in the wall, and the physicist is eating, too. He calculated how exactly to throw the can against the wall, so that it would crack open.

When the psychologists open the topologists's room, the paper is also full of formulas, the can is still closed, and the mathematician has disappeared. But there are strange noises coming from inside the can...

Someone gets an opener and opens the can. The topologist, covered in tuna fish, crawls out. "Dammit! I got a sign wrong again..."