PASADENA, CA-- Contrary to previous results, an extensive 14-year study hosted by The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in conjunction with the Brookings Institute has concluded that Memphis, Tennessee, is not, in fact, the center of the universe.
This controversial finding has apparently caught many Memphians off guard. Ray Bell, 33, of Bartlett summed up the prevailing reaction to the study when quoted as saying, “Yeah, right, and we're supposed to come from a buncha monkeys too. Sounds un-Christian to me."
Some mid-southerners, however, took the finding in stride.
Kaitlin Peters, 19, of Collierville, seemed non-plussed when voicing her stand on the findings by taking a philosophical stance at the Oak Court Mall Chick-Fil-A. “What’s a Universe?” She simply asked, after which she returned to her waffle fries.
Like Peters, people who have this condition, often referred to as Ostrichitis, consume up
to two thirds of their day assiduously trying not to be confused by actual facts.
This confirmed by a recent study from Washington D.C. based think tank The Right Group who's recently released white paper conluded that facts were highly unreliable since facts could be used to prove anything. In a related note, President George Bush is said to have framed a large print version of the white paper to be framed above his bath tub.
But not Carlo Porreca, 54, director of GeoPhysical Studies at The Pink Palace Planetarium. Porreca and his colleagues at the Planetarium are presenting new research on what they have named Non-Memphis Centric Syndrome at the annual meeting of the Tri-County Flat Earth Society, a conference being held in partnership with Southerners For A Xenophobic Future.
They’ve found that Memphis, while perhaps not actually the center of the universe, is “at least within spitting distance, if one could spit 8 trillion light years, of course.”
Meanwhile, the debate escalates in both camps. What is a universe? What’s at the atomic weight of a waffle fry? Can Harold Ford shed some light on the situation?
It’s a multi-faceted problem the Tattler Geo-Physical team is planning to address in a future series of articles entitled Memphis: Here Or There? Until then try to stay centered.
